Hello everyone.
As you know, agricultural drones are increasing day by day. I think ArduCopter is starting to lag behind in Agricultural Drone. A few settings, parameters, plugins, sections …etc that are specific to the farming drone. Adding it helps a lot.
For example:
1- Continuing the task from the coordinate he left. Not starting from the previous “Waypoint” point.
2- When Battery Failsafe is active, there is no need for On-Off
3- Pump - Speed settings can be made in a separate section without entering the parameter list.
4- Having a separate section like “Initial Parameter Setup”
5- Big Engine (such as Hobbywing X6, X8, X9, X11) - Automatic for Propellers - Recommended PID - Filter parameter setting section. 23 inch - 30 inch - 34 inch -36 inch Propellers .
6- …
7- …
I think it will bring a great usage area and experience to the Ardupilot Platform.
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Also, I would appreciate it if those who need it like me add their own comments. In this way, it becomes clearer how great the need is.
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No: Sorry for the translation errors.
I could not quite understand that, can you explain it better?
You would have to specify all the components of such a section, like maybe pump parameters, and convince someone to implement it.
I’m working on something similar, if it can even be done. It’s difficult to recommend default PIDs for any copter because the the size and weight distribution, component selection, battery and probably even wiring can all make quite a difference.
The “problem” with Ardupilot is it can operate so many different platforms and such a huge variety of components and combinations - that setup and tuning can be complex. Of course this is derived from necessity and demands by users and use-cases.
Dear @xfacta thank you for your detailed answer.
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When the drone RTL in the “Battery Failsafe” state, it does not come out of the “Battery Faisafe” state without removing the battery and putting it back. In other words, even if the drug tank is empty and the battery is not exhausted, it is still necessary to remove the battery and put it back in.
This can be implemented via scripting but might be worthy of exploration as an addition to the navigation codebase.
This seems like a strange request. Are you using battery failsafe to indicate an empty sprayer tank? If that’s the case, I think what you really want is a failsafe that detects an empty tank and performs an RTL function rather than poorly implementing a battery failsafe.
I don’t think sprayer drones are so proliferated as to gain much traction on this request. You might consider forking Mission Planner and adding this to a custom build.
@Yuri_Rage Thank you.
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For the pesticide store, we configure “Battery Monitor 2”.
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Sorry, I don’t have any coding knowledge.
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The Agricultural Drone market has grown a lot. And it’s monopolized by a few brands. Especially DJI.
Hi all,
I figured I would chime in here as this is my field. My company operates 90% of our business in ag related aerial releases.
The ability to easily resume a mission where you ran out of materials would be a huge advancement. The ability to denote during the flight the point where you command an rtl or stop applicaiton and have that saved somehow, somwhere to modify quickly for the next flight would be very convenient. I use ardupilot for all of my flights but have found that other options out there make the software, GUI and other interfaces uch less complicaited for folks to operate in this environment.
One of the FAA requirements for a part 137 certificate (ag operations) is the abilty of the aircraft to stop spraying or releasing its output when communicaitons between the RC and the aircraft is terminated, resulting in an RTL. I ahve not found an auto off if using a set servo or relay command to output materials during the mission. You can manually do this on your RC but WHAT IF the RC link is severed?
The preceding paragraphs support the original authors points 1 and 2.
Allowing the user to configure an ADC pin as an “Aux Sensor” and including a parameter to specify units per volt would likely suit a wide range of users. Allowing a configurable failsafe against such an aux sensor seems like a reasonable inclusion.
@iampete, what say you?
@geofrancis, I think you’ve expressed similar desires in the past as well.
Yes, I think it was for an analogue water sensor to set up a failsafe on a boat, but it ended up being easier to use one with a configurable digital output because it was simpler to connect that in as a button since there was no universal analogue button equivalent.
Ideally it would have something like a ratio, an offset and a trigger value like an analogue version of the button inputs.
@DustinK As someone in the field of Agricultural Drone, thank you for your contribution.
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@Yuri_Rage , @geofrancis Thank you
In the meantime, I worked up a Lua script that inserts a waypoint at the location where a battery failsafe occurs and stores its waypoint index in a file on the SD card. If the waypoint index stored in that file is non-zero at boot time, the mission will resume at the inserted waypoint.
I tested in SITL with a fair amount of success but implore you to do the same before implementing this on a large agricultural vehicle. There is an underlying assumption that the path from the takeoff location to any point in the mission will be clear of obstacles. If you cannot ensure obstacle clearance, DO NOT use this script!
EDIT: I updated the attached script to do a modicum of error checking, ensuring the resume waypoint has not changed location.
If there are DO_COMMAND actions required upon mission entry (such as activating a pump relay), then we’ll have to add those to the script as well.
@iampete, any suggestions for script improvement?
copter-mission-resume.lua (4.9 KB)
I am waiting for the contributions of those who make / will make Agricultural Drones with ArduCopter.
It is also very important for agro drones to add the ability to highlight obstacles inside the field and build missions around these obstacles. those. not only external polygons are needed, but also internal ones. by analogy with dji and Chinese flight controllers for agro drones
@Evgeny_Makarov You are absolutely right. A few days ago, I tested a 20 liter agricultural drone. It is very stable even at full load. It would be great if the developers made a few improvements for their farming drones. Unfortunately, I can’t contribute because I don’t understand coding.
@Havas_Robotic I am using both Pixhawk + Arducopter + QGC and another Chinese package VK flight controller + VK firmware + Jiagu Agriculture app. As for the data, they must be linked to the China cloud and all our data will be stored by the Chinese servers. My take is that the bulk of the work is on adding features to the ground control station app to make it more user-friendly. Only a few hardware add-ons like pumps, flow meters, and radars will need to be added as peripherals to Arducopter. That way we will have an open-sourced agriculture drone that does not stream data to China.
Just a question to all, is it worth it to develop all these? I see that most of the farmers are using DJI as their farming drone equipment.
We do support a rewind distance, to resume at the point you stopped just set a small repeat distance.
https://ardupilot.org/planner/docs/common-mission-rewind.html
Hi! Swarm agro drone system user/dev here. We ended up making our own UI and overall mission planner mainly because for our task we have to spray about 20t or more per day, while using several drones at the same time. Dji and XAG are nice, but we cannot use them as we want. We solved most of the features you requested but maybe you can use some of our ideas.
- Rewind or make your mission based on the distance you would need to spray your whole tank(like us).
- We send a command and reset the battery % to full. Maybe MP or QGC has"MAV_CMD_RESET_BATTERY_PCT" command somewhere. We have a secondary battery to power the AP and our companion so we we only repower the ESCs when changing battery. It stays on for up to 8h.
- We have it as a PWM and servo and we change it with a DO_SET_SERVO.
- I think that is really hard. I hope Shawn’s idea works. We basically spend a lot of time making sure: the frame is good enough mechanically, do a thrust test of what ESC/motor combo we use, the gyro filtering is very good, autotune is done and checked thoroughly.
Servos(pwm pumps/spreaders/etc.) can be set at grippers, which can be triggered when FS is activated. @DustinK
There is one thing that we have struggled with and were not able to yet solve. A all weather, all lighting, 360/180° collision avoidance system.
Hope this helps.