I am in the early stages of developing an autonomous landing system for a fixed-wing drone and I’m looking for some guidance. I am new to ArduPilot and am trying to decide between using LIDAR or RADAR for altitude measurement during landing.
From my research, it seems that many people use LIDAR, but I haven’t seen much on RADAR. Could anyone share their experiences and insights on the pros and cons of using LIDAR versus RADAR for this application? Also, it seems like the sensor won’t always be pointed directly at the ground, so how do you deal with the angle of the sensor changing with the bank angle (like if you are spiraling lower to the ground) and pitch?
I am working on setting up a radar for fixed wing landing. In my opinion radar benefits from not having to have an optical window pointing down it is also more resilient to lighting conditions .
The slant range isn’t really an issue as during landing the plane or copter is reasonably level, there was a thread on compensation but I don’t remember the conclusion right now.
I was testing LD-2450 a cheap (~$4) human presence sensor. For now without much success in utilizing it for landing as it kicks in a bit too late (maybe due to steep approach required for obstacle clearance). It has a range of 6.5m but in flight testing it lost track of the ground below 2.5-3m
Now I am going to test a different sensor LD-1125S (~5) with a different configuration that should be a bit more suitable as it is advertised a bit more in the rangefinding role.
The above radars are not configured for tracking static targets (like ground when hovering) so I would consider them potentially useful for landing slow down and not surface tracking on multicopters.
I also plan to test a bit more expensive sensor FM24-NP100 (~$90) or something similar with better range.
If you want I can share the driver I wrote for LD-2450.
Thanks for the advice. I’m looking for a bit longer range so I may check out the FM24-NP100. Any link to the thread on compensation you are talking about?
.