Makani was a project to develop a commercial-scale airborne wind turbine, culminating in a flight test of the Makani M600 off the coast of Norway. All Makani software has now been open-sourced. This repository contains the working Makani flight simulator, controller (autopilot), visualizer, and command center flight monitoring tools. Additionally, almost all avionics firmware is also included, albeit potentially not in a buildable state, due to the removal of some third-party proprietary code. We hope that this code will be inspirational and useful to the kite-based windpower and wider communities.
analysis- Miscellaneous analysis scripts. The most important files here areanalysis/control/crosswind.py, which generates the gains for the crosswind inner loop controller, andanalysis/control/generate_hover_controllers.m, which generates the gains for the hover controller.avionics- Firmware for the winch, ground station, motors, network, servos, batteries, network switches, GPS, strobe lights, etc.control- The hover, transition-in, crosswind, and off-tether flight controllers.commonconfig- A Python-based configuration system produces a JSON dict specifying all system, controller, and simulation parameters. This is translated into a read-only C structure at compile-time.database- Aero tables, Pitot calibration tables, etc.documentationvis- OpenGL-based visualizer that depicts the state of the system during simulation and real flight.
This code base was originally designed to run on Linux systems running the Debian Stretch distribution. For the convenience of future users, we are shipping this open source release with a script to create the necessary environment within Docker.
The Control Telemetry Users' guide, included as a PDF with this distribution, gives a full description of log file data structures. It also gives examples for how to load and plot log data using Python or MATLAB.