Formation flying with arduplane

ArduPlane Plane 3.6
1

Hello,
Recently me and my friends started flying a formation of FPV planes.
I have noticed that finding my friend plane while flying is really hard and takes some time.

I was wondering if there is a way to make the two telemetries modules of the planes to commuincate one with the other and show on the video the location of the other airplane - some kind of home arrow - pointing to the other aircraft or even a box marking it on the screen?

Thanks,
Yuval

2

Hi Yuval
I don’t think there is a solution to do directly what you want, however the first steps to make this work would involve:

  1. Using Mavproxy to collect all and share to all, every telemetry stream and mavlink messages with GPS positions of each craft. It’s likely this would only be possible by using wifi telemetry and the use mavproxy for routing over IP http://dronecode.github.io/MAVProxy/html/index.html
  2. Create a python (or other) module that creates relative positions for each user using that data
  3. Then add code to miniOSD to read those positions in the mavlink stream to display icons on the OSD HUD.

I think it’s a cool idea btw and something that would be very useful for FPV racing, especially quad racing as well. I’d possibly add lap times to each other quad. To display on a 2D HUD could be a bit difficult but could be done as a top down map view showing the relative positions on a track (Like in PS3 GT), however it would be hard to display altitudes at the same time.

3
4

It does i exist
https://formationflight.org/