I’ve spent the day preparing to try 4.2 beta and it’s improvements for Optical Flow.
I spent several hours calibrating flow_fyscaler and flow_fxscaler. I’m curious to see the difference the automatic calibration sets for these parameters.
I did some testing in Flowhold to see if the changes improved performance. They did - although in Flowhold, the copter is a bit twitchy - as if the PID’s were out of whack.
Looking ahead at the procedure in the docs for the 4.2 optical flow auto calibration - I was wondering if just switching to flow hold would be the same as the parameter changes:
I know that RTL is supposed to work with optical flow, but I’ve never read that optical flow allows identification of waypoints required for flying in Auto.
In general I don’t recommend using FlowHold on vehicles that have a lidar because it doesn’t perform as well as Loiter, PosHold, etc. The mode was really developed for the SkyViper copters that have an optical flow sensor but no lidar. On these vehicles it’s better than nothing but for vehicles with a lidar, might as well use it.
Switching to FlowHold is not the same as making the listed parameter changes. They’re unrelated…
Yes, RTL (and all other modes for that matter) will work as long as the vehicle stays within the lidar’s range. If the vehicle doesn’t have a GPS then you’ll need to set the EKF origin which can be done from Mission Planner by right-mouse-button-clicking on the map.
To calibrate the opticalflow I highly recommend using the inflight calibration procedure. It should be better than the manual procedure.
