Hello community,
I made this relatively basic robotic autopilot for my create airship for create aeronautics. You can find the link to the code here. It works pretty decent allowing the 120-odd long airship to end up always within 20 blocks and 20 degrees of the desired pose. Also keeps itself stable to within like 0.2 degrees
Pathfinding is implemented through using dubin's paths which allow vehicles that can only travel forward and turn to end up at any desired point in 2d space (x,y,orientation) through the shortest path possible. Some considerations are that Dubin's original paper required the points to be distinct, so for example 0,0,0 to 0,0,0 is mapped to a circular path when the shortest path in reality the correct choice would just be to not move.
Heres a link to a decent more in depth explanation https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/a-comprehensive-step-by-step-tutorial-to-computing-dubins-paths/
Heres a desmos calculator which is a more visual way to play around with the paths (and is also the math the code implements) https://www.desmos.com/calculator/vbocmzun5r
Actual control is implemented using a stanley control which comes from SAIL labs 2005 winning submission for DARPA autonomous car race. Lowkey it does not work that well as the airship has way too much inertia and "drifts" and I should've just stuck with pure pursuit so I might change it. I don't have any experience in UAVs really so if anyone has better ideas (or better yet pull requests) for control I'm happy to hear (merge) those
link to stanley control paper https://ai.stanford.edu/~gabeh/papers/hoffmann_stanley_control07.pdf
I had claude make a little simulation which works sorta well to display how a blimp might behave under certain config values which hopefully makes it easier to understand how to mess with config values for your airship to make it actually work.
Additionally, the code also has a stabilization PID controller, relatively straight forward.
Code is still somewhat cooked. You need basalt for UI (I'm not a good UI designer). Also I was trying to figure out how to get it to display a map on the screen with the path that was being followed but lowk couldn't get it to work.
Code is located at this repository https://github.com/catmajor/Autonomous-Autopilot (please feed me stars for my github clout)
This was my first time touching CC/lua so theres some work to be done refactoring wise (did not realize there was a native vector class)
If you want to use it you'll need to clone it and copy it to a computer in your game. Your vehicle will (very likely) need to be tuned, and most definetly will need to be configured for the specific control peripherals. (Also make sure to install basalt if you want to use the gui) The needed values are in config.lua, and most of the update logic is in flight_controller.lua. Also, I am using CC: Sable for positioning because CC's gps is kind of innacurate but you can use it and if you do so you'll need to change code in gps.lua. You'll typically want to set your min turn radius to be a bit bigger than your actual min (the more the better usually). The stanley_k / front axle variable really depends on how much inertia your vehicle has.
