One of the disadvantages of the open source autopilots, compared to the proprietary ones, is that most of them do not have a support team to resolve doubts or problems, when you are adjusting and operating the autopilot. Many of these companies only offer manuals or bots with very limited responses. These situations sometimes can paralyze your project or even cancel it, as well as generating numerous headaches for your engineers.
Herein lies the importance of having a whole team of support engineers behind a product. Staff available always to provide support or to develop customized solutions, remotely and onsite. Here is a brief summary of the types of services that all the autopilot’s brands should offer:
- Contact & solved support: this is a basic free support. The client can call or send an email to ask questions or doubts; the PDI engineers will give them orientation and indications to solve their problems.
- On-site support: technical assistance service at the customer’s facilities. The ideal support for the first flight tests. PDI engineers will be able to acquire the final values of the gain matrix and other tuning parameters. This support allows the customer’s engineers to work side by side with the PDI engineer, learning a lot and ensuring a safe operation.
- Remote support: Extended support carried out from Embention facilities. The favorite of those clients with custom software or hardware development needs for their systems.
- Configuration & HIL model: in this service our engineers create a digital model of your platform and leave the autopilot 95% configured on default of only the fine tuning that has to be performed during the flight tests. The virtual model of the aircraft allows to carry out Hardware In the Loop simulations, very useful to get approximate values of the gain matrix and other tuning parameters.
- Continuous engineering: for the most demanding projects, one of our engineers, an expert in the required field, is at the total disposal of the client, this support can be carried out onsite or remotely.
At Embention we have always tried to offer our clients the best of both worlds, providing them with all the necessary tools to carry out their own developments and integrations (the best of the open source autopilots), but always with the support and comfort of knowing that they have a whole support team, ready to help them in any situation.
