Terrain Following in Survey Mission

QGroundControl
1

I am new to QGC. Is it possible to fly a survey mission while using an on-board laser rangefinder to follow terrain? I do not see an option while setting survey options to enable a rangefinder. Thanks.

2

That is not supported. What is supported in generating a survey (or Plan) based on terrain height informaion such that it will follow terrain. But with that the mission item altitudes themselves are created such that it follows terrain.

3

Thanks for the info. I would like to find a way to use the rangefinder. My mission requires flight at low altitude with tight altitude compliance over rolling terrain. I have experimented using the DEM terrain height but it is just not accurate enough, even using 1 meter DEM data.

4

Do you have a solution for your problem ? Because I search also a solution for to fly at low altitude.
Thank you

5

Current QGC daily builds now have support terrain frame missions either using rangefinder or teh gcs sending terrain data to the vehicle so it can fly terrain frame. What it does not have is the ability to use terrain frame for surveys. It still only has the gcs side generated terrain follow as described further up this thread. I was thinking that in a lot of cases that is actually better because it allows you to visualize the actual flight path which is going to the taken. Whereas using terrain frame does not (since it is vehicle controlled). But the specific use case of using rangefinder to fly tighter to terrain than a gcs generated plan based on terrain data can do was something I didn’t think about. Can you enter an issue for this on QGC GitHub? Now that QGC support terrain frame it should be fairly straightforward to make the Patterns (Survey, Corridor Scan) support terrain frame as well.

6

I use the QGROUND for drones with Radars or Lidar for RangeFinder for the drone to maintain the altitude of the distance sensor (follow terrain), so that it makes a Survey flight plan with the Terrain Frame option, which is determined in the START MISSION, it is also accepted in the creation of individual Waypoints, but, it is not created when used in the Survey option with “Follow Terrain”, that for my flight tests, it would be enough to create the waypoints with the Option “MAV_FRAME_GLOBAL_TERRAIN_ALT”, that’s it!

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