The "eBumper incorporates acoustic and vision sensors as inspired by insects to enable safe flight operations". When it senses obstacles it takes over control of the vehicle and moves away to a safe distance. It will be available first for the DJI Phantom and then for other vehicles. No pricing yet given.
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One could set up the module to monitor the mode switch to either adjust or shut down the obstacle avoidance but that does feel a little clunky. That said, I have had some success with my copter even in acro/stabilise on the KK2.0 but the downwards sonar does really need to be active in this case to compensate for altitude loss during pitch/roll, so a unilateral form of alt hold.
I have also experimented with using some D term but filtering is required to avoid excessive output when and obstacle that was already close suddenly comes into range of one of the sensors.
You assume it is already in Alt hold or position hold for example, in which case the inputs do not have a large effect. But your not looking for a large effect, so tuning is fairly easy.
We have simple PI loops in our controller, and usually you just play around with P.
Have you found that it's something that you can just throw on a different copter and expect to it to work?
I also went down the route of intercepting input controls (although we initially started with PWM so selected channels could physically bypass the system before moving on to the single wire protocols) but I found that I've had to do quite a bit of tuning to get it to work right on a different flight controller/airframe/input scaling etc... All of this if fine if you're used to setting it up, but it adds a whole layer of extra things to tune, and I'd be worried that for a novice flyer, setting the system up would actually make them prone to crashing, so I do also see the value in aiming for a fixed platform if you're going for a popular product.
You can make it work for ANY rc controlled drone, just use PPM (servo signal), as we did.
May need to adjust what axis, does what, but that's simple.
@Chris You make it work with APM/Pixhawk and we will do things nobody has done in conservation efforts.
HeliStorm, I'll see your woodpecker and raise you a juvenile raccoon who's having a fine old time for about a week now at 0300 hrs scrabbling around in the walls and ceilings of our 140 year old house . We need a little bitty rover to run him out!
I saw this at the AUVSI Show in Orlando. Very cool how it works. It uses arrays of sonar sensors.
Here are a couple more close up pics from AUVSI this year-
Bring on the SLAM (I'm hinting at a Monty Python song here)
Marcus: The eBumper team has been in touch with us and do plan to port to APM/Pixhawk.
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