I am interested in air to air flight following, fixed-wing. Searching this forum for the exact phrase “flight following” there is only one post from 5 years ago. What am I missing? How would one use an air-to-air radio link to pass mavlink or other commands to allow one airplane to closely follow another, perhaps with offsets in X, Y or Z? And after that is working, let’s throw in some vision algorithms to further refine the tracking.
Kelly
What you are proposing may be quite difficult, depending on the accuracy of the following, and how it is implemented. I am not surprised that it is rarely done, and rarely discussed, so I’m not sure that you are “missing” anything…
Arducopter can do it. So you could take a look at that code for inspiration and do a github PR?
Happy to take a look. Can you direct me to which part of the code, and if there is any user documentation on how to use flight following? Also, who were lead devs on this capability? Thanks,
Kelly
It is called “follow_me” flight mode. It was added by @rmackay9. It is not fully documented yet. The only available info is https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/7655