Avoidance using Pixhawk and Mavlink + Software for LIDAR and 3D Mapping

Help
1

Dear all,

My request has two slices where I hope you can help me to solve my remaining issues. First, I finally assembled my drone, the manual flight was tested and the outcome was better than expected: great stability (weight around 2KG), flight time around 6 minutes with a 4S Lipo 5400 mAh 35 C, etc. An autonomous flight was tested as well over a terrain and the outcome was similar to the manual flight. My remaining tasks are - the avoidance test using a PIXHAWK 4, EZ0 and PI4; - 3D mapping using RP LIDAR Light.

My two queries are as follows:

  1. Is there any site, document, or any relevant online help that will guide us to realize the avoidance. Using PX4 for autonomous pilot is easy but integrating the avoidance and Mavlink turned out to be complicated. All I’m asking an online guide to start with and we will manage as we did before.

  2. We are searching for a free software (impossible I can say) that is suitable for 3D mapping using a LIDAR installed on a drone. We know about LASTOOLS but it is very complicated and the guide is more and more complicated. Is there any software that can help us to produce our DEM (Digital Elevation model) or DTM --> Render to generate the 3D map.

Thank you in advance

Regards,

2

Ardupilot supports using lidars for simple obstacle avoidance - Benewake TFmini / TFmini Plus lidar — Copter documentation

And you can also do full on 3d mapping and localisation using lidars (SLAM) but fir this you need to use ROS - ROS and Hector SLAM for Non-GPS Navigation — Dev documentation maybe you could use a variation of this to produce dem. But I honestly do know much about using lidar for survey purposes

Hope that helps get you started in the correct direction. :+1:

3

Thank you so much for your guidance :slight_smile: the first link was interesting and we will see where we can go from there. However, we are not using ROS and it seems that getting the XYZ data from lidar mounted on a drone is not simple at all since we need to get the X AND Y from the GPS and the IMU and combine them with the Z from the lidar!!

Anw, thank you again for your help!

P.S: i will share a link that i found where some people used python Lib and made a drone-kit for telemetry and 3d mapping. HOPE IT WILL HELP ANYONEhttps://dronekit-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about/overview.html