A few days ago the main developer (Andrew Tridgell) of the APM plane project released a video showing a demo autonomous mission of the upcomming release of arduplane 3.5 which is totally awesome!
So now we can start to work on quadcopter plane hybrid designs to have the advantages of being able to take off and land in small spaces, but the endurance of a fixed wing plane!
Hi Alex, I am going to hand fly the takeoff and landing and use the autopilot for conventional flight. It will be a custom vehicle used for aerial photography andother missions. I have found autopilots that will fly the aircraft in all phases but they are very expensive, at least $6000Thanks. Stan
If you will be doing that under manual pilot controller you can do that with a pixhawk autopilot. You can setup a waypoint mission for mapping etc… And the last waypoint can be a loiter around the home point. Then you can switch to manual mode to land it under your control. Is that what you where planning?
Yes, unless someone figures out a way for the autopilot to do the takeoff and landings.Thanks, Stan
I am sure its only a matter of time now that most of the APM plane developers are working on the hybrid VTOL style aircraft 