Recently we’ve been seeing more questions popping up related to autonomous flight in the AVR competition. I put together a demonstration video to help clarify some things.
There are a lot of moving parts (literally!) when it comes to waypoint navigation. Please be sure to review the video overview here:
https://bellflight.github.io/AVR-2022/autonomy-and-beyond/
as well as the FCM README file:
Please don’t hesitate to follow up with any questions or concerns!
Okay so last time our team looked into this aspect, someone else on here, I think Nathan, said autonomous AVR flight is not supported/possible.
So I’m confused now, because from my understanding of the rules, the AVR gets autonomous points if the peripherals are autonomous, even if the pilot is hand flying it in Phases 1 and 2.
So are we expected to shoot for autonomous flight or not?
this is the post I’m thinking of
what the original post was asking about was a direct way to control propellers, such as that which you can do in Q-Ground Control, whenever you can set a certain power to each individual motor. The post went on the clarify that you can do autonomous flight by sending messages via MQTT telling it to go to certain areas, as shown: Autonomous Code Snippets - #3 by Jonah and Autonomous Code Snippets - #4 by nathan
Basically, you cannot directly control individual motors, but you can control where drone goes to by giving it a coordinate
Sorry for not stating that clearly in the first place. Yes, QGroundControl can control motors independently (only while not airborne I believe). I was interpreting the question as asking about doing so autonomously while airborne
(Since QGC can do it, you could probably send raw MAVLink commands to emulate that, but that is outside the scope of AVR)