Simple Object Avoidance with 360 lidar

ArduCopter Copter 3.6
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Hi guys,

I would be please to get some advise about parameters setting for Simple Object avoidance.
I need to use a drone to follow building walls without hitting them. Because of some holes and or windows on this buildings, i choose a 360 lidar ref RPLIDAR A2 (to be able to detect the windows borders when aligned with a hole)

I already configured the Pixhawk to use the Lidar and have some questions about advanced features :
How can i define a specific detection area ?
I saw on this page of the Wiki that the 360 area could be divided in 8 sectors and that these sectors could be used or ignored by the drone. In my case i would be please to use only the 135 degrees front sector (sector 1+2+8) but i can not find how to deactivate the not needed ones.

Can we define the range detection manually in the parameters ?
In other words, can we exclude objects detections in a specific distance from the lidar? to avoid detecting a GPS mast or something like that (very close to the lidar) eg: i want to detect dangers from 1m to 5m.

Thank you in advance !

2

Thanks to someone i had a part of the answer
The parameters to setup seems to be PRX_YAW_CORR + PRX_IGN_ANG + PRX_IGN_WID but i can’t find any instruction to help me in the configuration process.
@rmackay9, did you documented this somewhere ?

Thanks in advance
Julien

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Julien, you’ll definitely need a companion computer for running SLAM.
I pretty sure a STM32F4 doesn’t have the resources for both flight and location awareness.

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Julien,

I’m having troubles getting the 360 lidar to hook up to ardupilot. I spliced the correct connector for the lidar to hook up to the pixhawk but Ardupilot isn’t hooking up to the sensor. Any suggestions?

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are you find the solution?
I have same problem with RP-LIDAR A2M12 sensor

I connect it to CUAV-X7+ and set the parameters as same as below link :
https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-rplidar-a2.html
but it doesn’t work!!!
Also I powered up sensor with external USB cable with my PC and still not work!
anyone can help me?

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Hey,

This topic is pretty old now but I will report what I made.

The division of lidar into many different sectors feature was pretty recent at the time I posted this topic, so I think the functionalities has been improved (I expect). Don’t know if it has been fixed because i never jumped back into this kind of setup since then.

I finally choose to use a basic lightwave SF11/C lidar pointing at the front. It is not the best for our specific purpose but it makes the job (I would prefer to get a larger scan of the obstacles). During the configuration of the lidar I spotted an issue with Arducopter. In some situations the drone was considering the wall to come to him and was not avoiding it…
It was looking like a new issue to me, but @rmackay9 was already aware of this problem and I had to hire an Ardupilot developer to fix it and makes my client happy. The fix has been pushed for free to the community and is already included in Arducopter since the v4.0 or something.