UBC UAS ACOM

About

Air Communication (ACOM) is the aircraft's on-board software that will be accepting commands during mission flight and change waypoint pathing ‘on-the-fly’ for the intent of dynamic obstacle avoidance.

Setup

Building using docker:

• First, install docker
• Second, to start the project run the following in the project base directory:

For x86:

ArduCopter: make run-copter
ArduPlane: make run-plane

For ARM:

ArduCopter: $ make run-copter-arm
ArduPlane: $ make run-plane-arm

See the Makefile for other run options

Running with serial devices connected via USB

If you want to run ACOM with a serial device instead of SITL, you must change the devices passed to docker in the Makefile, which gives Docker permission to access your serial device. Some of these have already been set up (such as the winch) and can simply be enabled in config.py and run with the associated Makefile command. See Giving Docker containers access to serial devices for more details

Running Mode

You can choose between running in "development" and "production". This is specified in config.py under "runMode" and changes which Flask config file is used (from instance)

Changing the configuration

See config.py to configure options. For IP address connection to SITL (usually testing), set connectionMode to "ip". For a serial connection (real flight), set connectionMode to "serial". For each, change their section values to match the desired settings.

Example with a serial device on COM8 with a baudrate of 115200

{
    "setup": {
        "connectionMode": "serial",
    },
    "ip": {
        "ipAddress": "acom-sitl",
        "port": 5760
    },
    "serial": {
        "serialPort": "/dev/ttyACM0",
        "baudRate": 115200
    }
}

Changing GCOM-X Endpoint

Depending on whether you are running ACOM locally or on an Odroid you will need to use different telemetry endpoints. In config.json you will see the following configurable variable. Make sure to select the endpoint you need by replacing the respective endpoint with the one listed below (testing is set by default).

Testing environment
"GCOMEndpoint": "http://host.docker.internal:8080/api/interop/telemetry"

Production environment
"GCOMEndpoint": "http://51.222.12.76:61633/api/interop/telemetry"

Enabling Winch

The winch can be enabled and disabled in config.json by modifying the variable "winchEnable". "winchEnable": true will allow winch to be used, false will ignore winch code block (the default value is set to false). Do not use enable when the winch is not attached.

The winch statuses are as follows:

0 - Disconnected
1 - Standby
2 - In Progress
3 - Error
4 - Complete
5 - Emergency Reel

Giving Docker containers access to serial devices

Docker containers do not have access to serial devices out of the box. Because of this, we need to give our container permission to access any devices we want to use.

• Find the name of your serial device (ex. COM8 on Windows || /dev/ttyACM0 on Linux )
• You will need to add the following flag to the Makefile: "--device DEVICENAME"

Example: 'run-acom-copter-arm' without serial devices:

run-acom-copter-arm: docker-arm run-dependencies
	docker run --rm -it -p 5000:5000 --network acom-net --add-host host.docker.internal:host-gateway --name acom-acom ubcuas/acom:copter-arm

Example Continued: 'run-acom-copter-arm' with access to '/dev/ttyACM0'

run-acom-copter-arm: docker-arm run-dependencies
	docker run --rm -it -p 5000:5000 --device /dev/ttyACM0 --network acom-net --add-host host.docker.internal:host-gateway --name acom-acom ubcuas/acom:copter-arm

NOTE: There is no simple way to access serial devices via Docker Desktop on Mac. This is an open issue 😭

Testing

• Run tests for the whole ACOM flask server:

ArduCopter: $ make ci-test-copter
ArduPlane: $ make ci-test-plane

Server URL

• 127.0.0.1:5000 (or localhost)

but it ultimately depends on what the Flask development URL binds itself to, look in the terminal after running

make run-[copter/plane]

Troubleshooting

[Errno -2] Name or service not known sleeping

When you run acom without uas-sitl, then you will have this error as it tries to connect to SITL through mavlink, but it can't find the address. To fix it, run SITL using make run-sitl-[copter/plane] or kill all the acom containers and run make run-[copter/plane].