Optical Flow for APM 2.5 - Oh Where Did You Go?

Posted by Doug Walmsley on June 25, 2013 at 6:00am

I've been reading various posts on the Google Code wiki site for Arduino and noted many folk's discussion for the last couple of years the Optical Flow sensor and updates to the firmware code.  Everything discussion wise stop in May of this year.

Is the Optical Flow from 3D Robotics discontinued for the APM units?  If so will the PX4Flow work with only the PX4 boards or can it be used on APM's.  Seems to be a bit unclear to me where 3D is going with respect to the APM's.

I'm looking to install this type of sensor and need support in the best way to tackle this.

 

Thanks,

Doug W.

 

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Replies

  • Developer
    Randy June 25, 2013 at 7:58am

    I think the PX4Flow will make a come back for the px4 anyway and, as Charles says, it'll be mainly useful for indoors or for those rare situations where you lose GPS lock.

    I'd expect us to get it working for the px4 flow in a few months (6 months max) including incorporating the velocities into the inertial navigation which is currently just accelerometers + gps.  I imagine we will try and get the old optical flow sensor also working in this way for the APM2.  I don't expect that anyone but jDrones will be providing the sensors though.

    The real problem with the old optical flow sensor was that it's output was never integrated into the position estimate because we hadn't developed the inertial nav complementary filter.

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