Hey guys, I have yet to try out dronebridge using ESP32s on both the drone and the PC (GCS) so before I jump into it, I have some clarifications:
As I understand, you can control the drone by sending commands over mavlink, which on the GCS side, I do using pymavlink. At this point, the drone should be in Auto mode, correct? Are there any other configurations necessary?
My drone is flown indoors with an optical flow sensor, so I can only send velocity and altitude commands to the drone, right?
This variation of Guided mode does not require a GPS but it only accepts attitude targets. Because it does not accept position or velocity targets like regular Guided mode it is generally not useful for regular users. This mode was created for use by companion computers that may want to fly the vehicle as if it was in AltHold mode.
The wiki doesn’t really make it clear. I understand I have to uses Guided_NoGPS but since I have an optical flow sensor, can’t I send velocity commands?
Guided_NoGPS only accepts attitude targets. AFAIK it is assumed that it will be used with companion computer that knows how it wants to control the drone as it has idea where the drone is so it is easier to let it control attitude to reach its desired vehicle state than to make sure that EKF accurately controls velocity.
You can rig (configure) EKF to run without absolute position source as long as you provide initial position. Then you can use all of position control library with the constraint that position will diverge over time.
I have optical flow. So why can’t I use velocity targets without GPS when optical flow directly compute velocity? I do not really care about accurate position estimation though. I mean, I do not want to fly to waypoints. I just want the drone to fly forwards and sideways at a fixed speed. I’m doing obstacle avoidance using vision.