The purpose of the supervisor is to monitor the system and its state. Depending on the situation, the supervisor can enable/disable functionality as well as take action to protect the system or humans close by.
The supervisor is based on a state machine that is driven from the supervisor loop. It is given the opportunity to modify other modules and data, such as the High level commander, setpoints, and motor control, to handle exceptional situations or for protection.
The update sequence
The update sequence is separated into a few steps:
- Collect data from sensors and the system. We call these conditions.
- Based on the conditions, check if the state machine should transition into a new state
- If there is a state transition, possibly execute one ore more actions
- Set the new state
Modifying behavior
The main modification of behavior is to prevent the motors from spinning when the system is not ready to fly, for instance if the system is not armed or the Crazyflie is up side down. Also the high level commander is blocked from running trajectories in this case.
Exceptional situations when flying, for instance when tumbling is detected, are simply handled by stopping the motors and free falling.
The supervisor framework provides the possibility to handle situations in a more “clever” way, such as doing a controlled landing when possible, instead of free falling, but that is currently not implemented.