Drone Swarming telemetry data

General
1

Hi @rmackay9 , @Yuri_Rage .

I am working on a drone swarming project i need some guidance that what telem data is very necessary from mavlink and fc to other slave modules. For eg. alt, gps coord, vehicle speed and etc. please suggest what params and data is needed.

Thankyou!

2

Hi @Harsh_Kumar_Jain,

I think the short answer is to send the FOLLOW_TARGET mavlink message and there’s a script for that here.

There are basically two ways to do it:

  1. all coordination done on the ground station (e.g. Mission Planner)
  2. do it on the vehicle (Copter follow mode, Plane follow lua script)

Hope that helps

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3

May I know which vechicle class has these parameters?

FOLT_ENABLE : Set to 1 to enable this script
FOLT_MAV_CHAN : MAVLink channel to which FOLLOW_TARGET should be sent

May I know where can the user locate these files example, mavlink_msgs_xxx?

Does the script allow many to follow one and the followers do not collide with each other?

4

okay, got it.

5

Hi @Jai.GAY,

The FOLT_xxx parameters are created by the script so this will work on any vehicle. To be clear though, the lead vehicle runs the follow-target-send.lua script and then a multicopter or tradheli will follow it in Follow mode.

The MAVLink directory including the messages files can be found here.

Clearly we need better documentation because this script isn’t even mentioned on the Follow mode wiki page. I’ll add that to the list!

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6

@rmackay9 but how can we control all drones using mission planner as in mission planner swarming feature we have to connect each drone telemetry to mission planner. But i dont want to do that, instead of connecting each telemetry to mission planner i want to connect only one master telemtry for eg. any elrs or any 3dr which is then connected with esp mesh to master

7

Hi @Dtown,

Yes, it’s the telemetry connection that is actually the most difficult part of getting a swarm working.

I think that DroneBridge supports a mesh network but I haven’t tried it yet myself.

BTW, here’s the Copter multiple vehicle flying wiki page although it’s fallen out of date.

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