What happens when the system loses GPS?

ArduRover Miscellaneous
1

Does anyone know how the Ardupilot software, specifically the rover branch, handles loss of GPS or severely degraded signal quality?

Let’s say you’ve instructed your rover to go from waypoint 1 to waypoint 2 and that course has it driving through a tunnel. Does the system stop the rover when GPS signal is lost? Or does it attempt to use the IMU to try to determine how far it has traveled?

If it’s the latter, IMU accelerometers are pretty noisy to be numerically integrated to give you slow speed distance changes. How is that noise filtered?

2

@RogueWarrior,

I have started a discussion on the Google Groups drones-discussion forum to answer your question. I should have an answer by the end of the day.

Regards,

TCIII ArduRover2 Developer

3

Hi RogueWarrior,
The Rover code currently does dead-reckoning using the compass and the last groundspeed it got from the GPS and tries to continue the mission. That works well for short GPS outages, but will start to degrade quite quickly.
At the moment there is no GPS failsafe setting, so you can’t ask it to enter HOLD mode on GPS loss. We should add that as an option, perhaps as FS_GPS_ENABLE=0/1.
Cheers, Tridge