I am planning to make an autonomous drone that would be able to follow or lead a rover using GPS. The copter should be 10 meters ahead or behind the rover. I tried the follow me mode in mission planner but that only allows the copter to be behind or on top of the rover. I want the copter to be ahead of the rover and I dont know how to proceed with that. Kindly help!
AFAIK the follow me offset between the two vehicles is fully configurable.
Is this a mission planner limitation?
How should I proceed to change the offset of the follow me mode ?
It’s defined in the APM Wiki here.
It only shows about following. I want the same thing but instead of following, it should be ahead of me. Like if (x,y) is my location then the drone should always be at (x+10,y+10), instead of following me. This way the drone would always be ahead of me.
From the wiki:
When switched into Follow, the vehicle will attempt to follow another vehicle (or anything publishing its position) at a specified offset.
- FOLL_OFS_X, FOLL_OFS_Y, FOLL_OFS_Z : 3D offset (in meters) from the lead vehicle
- FOLL_OFS_TYPE : set to 0 if offsets are North-East-Down, 1 if offsets are relative to lead vehicle’s heading
- FOLL_YAW_BEHAVE : controls whether follow points in the same direction as lead vehicle or always towards it
It would seem to me (although I have not tried it) that the 3D offsets should support your needs. The offset range is -100 to 100 meters. You will also need to set FOLL_OFS_TYPE to 1.
OK thanks! Will try that.
Hey ! I’d like to know if you maked it work ? My foll_ofs_x are not taken into account, maybe I am doing it wrong and i have an other parameter to set ?