I'd like to achieve the Solo Cable Cam effect with my 3DR Y6 running APM2.6.
I'd like to fly backwards beside a road and yaw the copter to film a car as it approaches and passes me. It's all quite low speed, the movement is just for effect rather than staying with the car.
My idea is to fly an auto WP segment with Condition-Yaw to make it set off backwards, then use the yaw stick to keep it facing the car as it approaches and passes by. The auto WP segment means I don't need to worry about flying, just pointing the camera.
This page says it will work. http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/auto-mode/#controls
This (older) page says stick inputs are ignored in Auto. https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot/issues/701.
(Neither say anything about my addition of the Condition-Yaw command to make it point backwards to start with).
Does WP_YAW_BEHAVIOR have a role? Must it be set to zero?
I think Sport mode is made for this, but I've never had much luck getting a consistent dolly direction with it.
Replies
Yaw commands should still be obeyed even in Auto mode. That ability was left in 'cuz some of the beta testers (Marco in particular) wanted to be able to point the nose of the vehicle (and the camera) during an Auto mission. So I think you're good!
You are correct... the docs don't really reference how to do this, but its not that hard.
If you set WP_YAW_BEHAVIOR to 0 then APM will not adjust yaw at all based on waypoints. I haven't tried it in conjunction with ROI or setting yaw... my guess it in those instances RC input is not honored (which is fine for my purposes)
So steps to do a cable cam-ish flight with APM:
1.) Plan out your path and upload waypoints, set speed, etc to the drone
2.) Set the WP_YAW_BEHAVIOR parameter to 0 and upload the changed parameter
3.) Fly your mission and manually control yaw and gimbal for your desired shot.
Hope this is helpful for others looking to do this... i'll post replies in the other dead threads I found when looking for answers as well.
I've finally done a test flight but the copter just points the same way the whole flight. I guess it was the same direction as it was facing when I switched into Auto mode. Looking at the paramater description it says for WP_YAW_BEHAVIOR 0=Never change yaw. That's exactly what it was doing.
Is there another setting I need to allow yaw stick input during auto / stick mixing? (I'm using Copter V3.2.1)
(There is a stick mixing parameter for APM Plane, but not for Copter.).
moglos,
You should be able to change the vehicle's yaw at any point during the mission with the transmiter's yaw stick. You may find that with Copter-3.2.1 that it retakes control of yaw after it passes a waypoint so you may need to touch the transmitter's yaw stick again after each waypoint.
There are a few options for WP_YAW_BEHAVIOUR:
0:Never change yaw, 1:Face next waypoint, 2:Face next waypoint except RTL, 3:Face along GPS course
I'd like to do this as well... based on what I've seen online and in discussions, I think this is disabled per the referenced github issue, but maybe used to be enabled.
I'm a software developer and tempted to try and figure out how to add this back into APM, but I'm not so sure I trust my quad in the hands of my code :-/