Mambo Fly unstable when flying using the parrotMini​droneHover​Start project

Whenever I fly the minidrone using parrotMinidroneHoverStart, it is very unstable and starts shaking or even drifts away completely. But when I use the iOS drone controller, it experiences no issue whatsoever. Could anyone tell me what the reason for this is?

Answer 1

[Débora Oliveira]

There are some firmware differences between these two controllers. When you use the:

• Parrot Apps to control the drone (as Parrot Minidrone), the drone has the original firmware.
• Matlab Parrot Minidrone Package, a new firmware is uploaded to the drone. This firmware opens a "backdoor" to the controller, allowing the server to send and receive packages from the MAV.

I saw a big oscillation of the simulated drone when in Hover. I corrected it by changing the optical flow model as described in this question. Unfortunately, this sensor model is not uploaded to the drone (only the controller is).

I have not yet figured out why the instability happens in the physical drone, maybe the controller is not so well-tuned as the original firmware one. I suppose the optical flow is hardware computed.

[wagenaartje]

The issue was fixed for me when I updated to the latest supported MATLAB version (2020b, on the right side of this page), since these kind of packages will only update between different MATLAB versions. The (MATLAB) flight controller of the latest version was much and much better, and I had much less instability. Good luck!

[Débora Oliveira]

Thanks for the information wagenaartje!

As the release note page doesn't mention any modifications in the block diagram, I didn't see any advantage updating. Now I will surely try the 20b version.