Advanced drone obstacle avoidance

ArduCopter
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1

Hi, i discovered that arducopter supports Djikstra’s algorithm for obstacle avoidance but a have a lot of questions :slightly_smiling_face:

_ What sensor or camera do I need?
_can I conbine it to a 360° lidar?
_ do I need a external processing power? (jeston nano, raspberry pi 4…?) or the pixhawk can process all of that?
_Should I install another software?
_Will the A* algorithm work in futur updates?

Thank you

2

Did you look at the wiki pages?
https://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/code-overview-object-avoidance.html
https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-object-avoidance-landing-page.html

1 Like
3

Yes but can’t find answers to my questions

4

Hi
To answer your questions, we have 2 different sets of Obstacle Avoiding features. One is for manual modes like Loiter, called Simple Avoidance… and the other is for Auto modes, which fall in to general Path Planning algorithms (like Dijkstras).
Currently, Dijkstra’s only supports avoiding GCS enabled fences… so you can’t use it for physical obstacles detected via sensors. To have avoidance of that, you’ll have to either use BendyRuler in auto modes, or Simple Avoidance in Loiter (more details are present in the documentation).

  1. The supported sensors are listed in the documentation
  2. You can only use ONE 360-Degree lidar. You cannot combine the 360-degree lidars. You can use multiple 1-D rangefinders (like Beneake TF-Mini)
  3. No, just a 2MB Flash Flight Controller is needed
  4. No, Just normal ArduPilot Firmware
  5. I have already converted Dijkstras to A* in the Lastest (Copter 4.2 Dev) version of ArduPilot.

As a side note, I am currently researching into ways to make A* work with real time obstacles, but I am not sure how well that will work.

1 Like
5

OK thank you for taking the time to make a detailed response I appreciate. So to summarize I can’t use a 360° lidar and a Tf mini plus. I must choose one of them or multiple Tf mini’s. (even if the 1d lidar is oriented to the bottom and the 360 on the top) Secondly Djikstra’s algorithm is not compatible with real world obstacle avoidance ( it would be awesome if so). So for now I must use bendy ruler with my 360° lidar and it can avoid obstacle in real time and overwrite my inputs to avoid an obstacle in manual mode. Like DJI drones
Did I understand everything?

And again Thank you

6

Does Arducopter support any unidirectional LIDAR sensor that connects through a UART (Tx and RX) such as the TOF Laser Range Sensor here or only those specifically listed on the wiki site here ? Thank you