Pixhawk 2.1, Tower App and terrain following

ArduCopter Copter 3.5
1

Hi, Hope you someone can help,

I have been searching around for an answer to my questions for at least a couple of weeks without much success so far and judging by the searches on this here for “terrain following” I’m not holding out much hope, but hopefully I’ll be proven wrong and someone may be able to help me out?

I have a DJI F550 hexacopter running Arducopter on a Pixhawk 2.1.

For ground station I use both mission planner and Tower for Android which both work well.

I am particularly interested in the follow me mode which has worked well in tests with my phone running tower, but it’s limitation is that it doesn’t terrain follow with my current setup. I am in the process of purchasing the Maxbotic EZ4 sonar senor and hope to get this working. In the meantime I would like to use tower to utilise SRTM data as detailed here:

http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/terrain-following.html

but there is not a great deal of info on how to do this. I’ve certainly not found any instructions on how to do this with tower. Also is this even possible with Tower?

From what I’ve read I understand that arducopter supports terrain following in auto, guided, follow me etc but I’ve read mixed reports of whether Tower can utilise terrain following. Maybe terrain following only works in mission planner but this is not practical for me as I would like to have my quad follow me on my mountain bike trails, and I can’t carry my windows laptop around with me (but can carry my android phone running tower).

Another question, it seems that it is not possible to use Tower (or mission planner?) to do a mission without having the RC controller to hand. Again if I would like to have the copter follow me on my bike, having to carry the RC controller is an extra problem? I understand there may be risks to not having the RC controller connected - is this why I cannot find a way to do this? i.e. I cannot arm the copter with tower (without the RC controller connected) because the copter has no RC signal and won’t allow it.

If this has been asked before, I’m sorry but my searches didn’t find what I needed.

Thanks in advance

Mike Brooks

2

Just want to do a terrain following mission now, did you succeed in it in mission planner?

3

I thought I sent this at the time but didn’t. Better late than never. I lost my dad in April and he was ill before that so copter went on hold, so not been too active. Anyway did manage to get terrain following to work with both sonar and lidar sensors but only in stabilise mode or in auto (waypoint) mode. I did not find out if it is possible in follow me mode. It probably is possible in follow me mode in MP but I did not try this. I wanted to use Android app “tower” to make follow me mode more portable. Lidar is much better and quite reliable, sonar not too great but sort of works. Don’t think he’s is great for sonar.