About "terrain follow" question?

Hi,all

the link:http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/terrain-following.html#terrain-following , have the passage below:

Terrain Following
Copter 3.4 (and higher) support “terrain following” in AUTO, Guided, RTL and Land flight modes. This feature allows the vehicle to climb or descend to maintain a specified distance above the terrain using either a downward facing Lidar or Sonar or from terrain altitude data provided by the ground station using a mapping service such as Google maps.

Setting up a Mission to use Terrain data
If relying on a downward facing LIDAR ensure it is setup as described here
If using GCS provided terrain data set the TERRAIN_ENABLE parameter to 1
Using a recent version of Mission Planner (or other GCS that supports terrain following) on the Flight Plan screen, set the altitude type to “Terrain”. Once set all mission commands that include an “Alt” fields will be interpreted as altitudes-above-terrain.
Upload the mission to the vehicle and execute the mission as you normally would in AUTO

so my questions below:

  1. if I used downward facing LIDAR to get “terrain follow”, should I enable TERRAIN_ENABLE and TERRAIN_FOLLOW parameters?

2.if I want to achieve “terrain fellow”, what’s the differences between using mission planner or dronekit-python app?

Thanks a lot

Tom

Hi,

As you can read in the TERRAIN_FOLLOW description, this parameter doesn’t affect Auto mode, so you don’t need to set it for missions. If you are using a Lidar, you probably don’t need to set TERRAIN_ENABLE to 1 too, but I’m not completely sure of that.

Dronekit isn’t an application, it is a framework to help developing applications interacting with MAVLink drones. You can use it to develop your own application, but if you want to use terrain following you need to make sure the methods you are using from Dronekit support it - specifically for missions, you need to make sure the waypoints are sent to the drone with a terrain altitude reference. For Dronekit support they have their own documentation and forum, check their website: http://dronekit.io

hi,OXINARF

Thanks a lot for your explanation. I have post a tipic in dronekit-python forum, unfortunately, noboty reply it.

Tom