Today we’re showing you something special we did with the all known follow mode – the project is called copter autonomously follows copter via the copter follow me mode. For doing this video we used two 650 Predator quadrocopters which you may already know from our other videos. The autonomous following copter is using the brandnew Pixhawk controller from 3DRobotics – the leading one is using the APM 2.5 also from 3DR – both with on of the latest beta firmwares (3.20 RC 12) and only little parameter tweaking.
To enable the copter follows copter mode, we put a smartphone – the Huawei Ascend P7 – with the copter controlling app droidplanner 2 on one copter. This represents the follow me device – or the leading copter. The other one is the autonomous follwing copter. So the idea is starting the following copter over the smartphone and bring him to hover via the loiter mode, starting the other copter and control the smartphone on the leading copter via the pepple smartwatch. The smartwatch app allows us to control the mode of the following copter. So that’s the way we want to start the following mode.
Like you can see in the video those procedure worked very well, we tried the next step which is circling with the following copter around the leading one. The setup for this setting is exactly the same – the only difference is the mode we switch the copter into. So this time Tommy commanded the copter to orbit the other one.
With the video, I guess the concept „copter autonomously follows copter“ is proofed – thanks to my buddy Sebastian who got the idea for it. We’re happy that everthing worked very well and there haven’t been any issues we had to handle with.
So long, stay tuned
Matt
