Aura-core is the heart of the AuraUAS project. It is distributed under the MIT license except where noted (see the licenses subdirectory for details.) AuraUAS is an embedded autopilot application for unmanned aircraft systems.

• Watch AuraUAS in action, raw and unedited
• Visit my blog for a variety of AuraUAS related projects and background information

Aura-core includes:

• An advanced 15-state EKF (extended kalman filter) developed by the University of Minnesota Aerospace Engineering Department. Internally the filter uses quaternion math to avoid gimbal lock issues.

• A sophisticated route management and waypoint following system.

• A sophisticated circle hold system that holds precise circles even in strong winds.

• A flexible/configurable PID-based control system. Several controller options are available including a classic PID controller and a velocity form controller, along with digital filters and summers. These can be mixed and matched to create multistage control systems. Gains and configurations can be tuned from the ground in real time.

• TECS values are computed and available as inputs to the PID controllers.

• Flexible device driver system.

• Property system: a system for managing and sharing hierarchically organized data between program modules and scripts.

• Native python script execution and integration on board.

• Flexible actuator support.

• Great circle distance and heading math.

• Self learning IMU temperature calibration system.

• System and health monitoring

Aura-core uses the automake/autoconf tool set and is built like many popular open-source projects.

1. Run: "./autogen.sh" in the top source directory.

2. Make a subdirectory called build (you can have multiple build directories setup with different build options, for example, supporting different architectures, debug vs. optimized release builds, profiling builds, etc.)

3. Run "../configure CFLAGS="-Wall -O3" CXXFLAGS="-Wall -O3"

4. Run "make"

AuraUAS is a complete (and independent) open-source autopilot. It features an inexpensive DIY hardware option and a professionally built (pick and place) hardware option. The design philosophy is built around creating a high quality, robust core set of features using a standardized hardware platform. Hardware was selected to strike a balance between keeping the system inexpensive for a hobbyist budget, while maintaining very high standards of performance and robustness.

This is not a project that attempts to do everything for everyone with every possible sensor and every possible use case. That approach adds tremendous complexity and other projects are pursuing this approach very effectively.

Aircraft are designed and developed with light weight as a priority in every phase. Analogous to that principle, AuraUAS is developed with simplicity as a priority. Aircraft don't always end up as light as we would like and AuraUAS is not as simple to understand as I would like, but know that this is a priority and something we push for at every step.

A core element of our 'simplicity' philosophy is that the autopilot code is divided into two main parts that run on separate processors.

1. All the sensor data collection and PWM servo control and the manual fail safe mode run on a Teensy-3.2 (or 3.6.) The firmware is developed in the arduino enviroment and addresses all the hard real-time needs of the autopilot system using a simple interrupt service routine model.

2. All the higher level functionality runs on an embedded linux platform. Currently this is a beaglebone, but the code can easily run on any linux-based system. The linux code is single threaded and uses non-blocking I/O strategies to maintain real-time 100hz performance.

   As part of the push towards simpler code, the linux-side application is a hybrid mix of C++ and python3. I have found that I can easily maintain 100hz real-time performance, even with a significant amount of python code in the main loop. Opinions may differ, but I find that python leads to 40-50% fewer lines of code, and that code can be much more readable. Embedded scripting also enables powerful feature development without needing to modify the core C++ code and recompile the firmware.

Together, the system is comprised of two simpler applications working together as a distributed system. You can compare this to the typical open-source autopilot architecture that results in a giant monolithic application which uses a complicated (and often brittle) thread-based architecture to maintain near real-time performance.

Over the past few years AuraUAS is evolved into a mature and stable autopilot system. It is a rock solid work horse for many of the University research projects I support. Still, with any system, there are endless feature changes and improvements to be made.

Immediate development goals include:

• Support for structured hdf5 data log export.

• Python 3 port. This is mostly completed, but needs further end-to-end testing to catch any lingering issues. The main challenge involved python3's switch from C-style strings to 'wide' strings, with the addition of bytearrray() to cover the need for C-style strings. This led to quite a few changes in the C++/python hybrid API code. In addition, some of the low level message parsing code needed rework.

• [done!] Implement a hand-thrown auto-launch task. This is written as a python task (within the python-based mission system) and produces very very solid and stable launch results for hand thrown airplanes (such as a Skywalker or Talon.)

• [done!] Add support for computing survey routes on board the aircraft. (The issue here is the brittleness and time required to send 100's of waypoints up to an aircraft over a radio modem link. Instead we can just send the area to be covered and some camera parameters and the aircraft can compute it's route internally.)

• [done!] Redesign and modernize the inexpensive reference hardware.