I am playing around with implementing radar proximity sensors on our drones. Looking at the ardupilot parameter list, it says that four proximity sensors can be configured, however when I open up the parameter list for our flight controller (Cube Orange, running Copter 4.4.0), settings for only three proximity sensors are available. I then checked the ardupilot code and saw that the maximum number of proximity sensors has been set to 3 (libraries/AP_Proximity/AP_Proximity.h:line 31)
Is there any reason for this limit? Has there been any testing done with 4 proximity sensors?
For reference, in our case, each radar module communicates with the flight controller using the DroneCAN protocol.
are you using rangefinders or proximity sensors? rangefinders are unidirectional sensors that give a single range and proximity devices like a 360 lidar give multiple ranges.
if your radars are unidirectional then you use as many as you want and set “use rangefinders as proximity”
Thanks for your reply. The devices are proximity devices, reporting the position of multiple objects within 3D space in a single frame using the ArduPilot DSDL Proximity message. Unfortunately setting them as rangefinders won’t work in this instance.
When I initially did the work to get multiple proximity sensor support, I thought 3 was a reasonable number. There is no actual limit, and it should be fairly easy to increase it to 4 or more.