Setting up a vtol in mission planner

Introduction
Setting up a vertical take off or landing (VTOL) uav is one of the more complex aspects of mission planner, for programming a pix hawk flight controller. The vtol that will be set up in this blog is a 2.5 meter wingspan, custom quad rotor, with all four motors tilting uav.

Figure 1. A screen capture of the firmware installation page of mission planner
 To begin install arduplane on your pixhawk, using the install firmware page in mission planner, figure 1 shows the pop up window that should appear.
Next once the firmware is installed go through each of the settings of the mandatory setup, including the accelerometer calibration, compass calibration and the radio calibration, but skip the servo output for now.

The next step is going to the full parameter list under the configuring and tuning tab, and enable Qplane, which stands for quadplane, and allows for all the vtol settings to be shown. Then the frame style and setup has to be configured, these have to be set up according to the motor layout and pinout described by the website in figure 3. Once they have been figured out they can then be input into the mission planner Q settings under there proper locations, then go back to servo outputs. The servo outputs then have to be changed to accommodate the new pin outs of the flight controller.
Figure 2. The Q Plane settings in mission planner

Figure 3. Frame types and classes for quadplanes in mission planner



















After the outs are corrected to the updated ones, then comes a whole bunch of calibrations. The escs have to be calibrated, this must be done with the propellers off. Next the servo tilt mechanism is calibrated to min and max, and adjusted to those positions in the servo output tab. Then verify that all the other control surfaces for the fixed wing operation are functioning correctly and in the right directions. 
Set the flight modes, Q stabilize and Q hover are good for initially testing the hovering settings. Once they are tested then start changing the PID's to correct for any improperly tuned axis. 

Then fly up to 200+ feet agl and test a transition from Q stabilized to stabilized. If anything goes wrong, prepare to switch to manual mode to continue in fixed wing, but with more control or, switch back into the hover to then land and change settings and try again. 

Vtols are very hard to set up, especially for uas, but if they can be made well, they can be outstanding aircraft for collecting data. 

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