PIXhawk communication with Raspberry Pi

ArduCopter
1

Hi all

I have been working on an autonomous drone for a University project. The goal of this project is to produce a drone which can autonomously fly from point a to point b, approximately 4m away. As the project is indoors, GPS is not an option.

I have the drone position calculated from an onboard Raspberry Pi with a camera, tracking fiducials placed on the ground. However, I am having serious issues getting communication working between the flight controller, a pixhawk, and Raspberry Pi Python scripts. The mavlink protocol appears to work, and the raspberry pi is able to receive data from the pixhawk via mavlink. However, I am having no luck in sending actual flight commands from the Raspberry Pi to the pixhawk. Any commands I attempt to send are rejected by the pixhawk, and it seems that the reason for this is the lack of GPS fix. Any suggestions as to the approach I can take to solve this would be much appreciated

2

@J_Pat
what type of mavlink command are you using for copter positioning?

As an another option (not sure if it good or not thought) - if you already know copter’s position then you could generate a fake GPS (NMEA) and feed your FC.
So while LOITER if you move your GPS coordinates then copter will try to compensate that and will be moving.