MAVLink-compatible ground rover

MAVLink
1

Hi all,

I’m currently building a MAVLink-compatible ground rover for HITL simulation using pymavlink. I’ve implemented a full MAVLink interface including:

  • HEARTBEAT, GLOBAL_POSITION_INT, SYS_STATUS, BATTERY_STATUS
  • MISSION_COUNT, MISSION_ITEM_INT, MISSION_ACK, MISSION_CURRENT, MISSION_ITEM_REACHED
  • MISSION_REQUEST_INT and MISSION_REQUEST_LIST handling
  • AUTOPILOT_VERSION and HOME_POSITION broadcast
  • Handling of COMMAND_LONG for mission start

The system also simulates rover motion and forwards commands to an Arduino-based motor controller via serial.

Problem:

When I try to upload a mission from QGroundControl (latest Daily), it fails with “Mission transfer failed”.
Despite this, QGC shows no vehicle settings under “Vehicle Setup” and mission upload always fails.

Questions:

  • Are there any additional messages QGC expects to see for the vehicle to become fully “recognized”?
  • Could the issue be related to missing parameters or component ID handling?
  • Does QGC expect MISSION_ITEM_INT to come from a specific component ID or include other flags?

Thanks in advance for any guidance or insights!

2

Right, that’s tricky. You will have to debug what exactly is going on.

I suggest to either add a few printfs in QGC yourself to check, or alternatively enable the mission transfer (or something like that) debug output in QGC → Console. If you start QGC from a terminal, you’ll then see debug output.

Alternatively, you could try to upload a mission using MAVSDK and if you set export MAVSDK_MISSION_TRANSFER_DEBUGGING=1 it’ll give you some more output as well.

And obviously, check the docs (Mission Protocol | MAVLink Guide) which I assume you have already done.

3

I tried to debug but got nowhere

Is there a simpler way to simulate raspberry pi as mavlink supported rover?

4

You can use MAVSDK server plugins. It’s very much rough and work in progress, but it’s for that thing, except for a drone and not a rover.

See: