Posted by Joel Ryan on January 16, 2010 at 10:58pm
I'm not sure if this is a dumb question, but I have no clue as to the answer, and I've been thinking about it for a while. I live in a very hilly area with plenty of cliffs, and could an ardupilot controlled uav possibly crash by flying into a hillside or cliff?
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Well, one simple idea that simply addresses the terrain(not power lines or trees, etc.) coming up to smack you would be to use the waypoint planning config tool to use Google-earth information about the sea-level height data underneath your proposed track - maybe you could even look left and right of the track some distance and find the highest terrain height. This data would be recorded for on board use(might have to be a table with lat/lon coords) and have a minimum height clearance to enter into the autopilot altitude calculation.
What worse there are no affordable solutions to this problem (under several KUSD lasers, specialized autopilots with FPGA and image processing, all experimental stuff very close to mil apps).
Uh, yes. They don't have radar. If you don't tell them to rise above obstacles, they'll hit them. That said, the configuration utility does have terrain data and you can tell it to automatically program a mission that won't hit hills.
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Looks more or less like a little PR hunting to me.
The same text has been posted in different discussion?
http://books.google.ca/books?id=EsjPyblwMdQC&pg=PA213&lpg=P...