I’ve been struggling with obstace avoidance for a while now. I think I finally have a nearly workable solution using circular exclusion fences around trees and other fixed obstacles. I did try a cheap Lidar unit, but I was very unhappy with performance (and setup, to be honest – ArduPilot does not document the various parameters very well). Perhaps I’ll revisit with a 360 Lidar at some point, but geofencing works for now!

If you struggle like I did, getting geofences to properly upload from Mission Planner, be sure MAVLink 2 is enabled. My telemetry antenna is connected to serial port 1, so I set SERIAL1_PROTOCOL=2.

, https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VY9Ga-CSPuI/hqdefault.jpg

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9 Comments

  1. If u want less than 1 meter, have you tried choosing units of feet and selecting 1 or two feet?

  2. Great work here I’m getting similar accuracies but now need to work out the best obstacle avoidance system
    I agree about the Lidar from my research in direct sun it not very reliable

  3. Hi, what method of sensing are you using for obstacle avoidance? Amazing work! Best regards.

  4. Hi, your lawn mower looks amazing i currently transformed a push lawn mower into an RC lawn mower for my senior project. My goal is to make it 100% autonomous can you tell me what kind of differential GPS did you use (a link would be great)? Also do you have a blog post that discusses your progress? Thank you in advance for your advice?

  5. Can I give this about 100 thumbs up!!! That is so awesome. I tried to play with the object avoidance a couple of months ago but I was having trouble with the Pixhawk controller which I had probably fried in the heat and just gave up. I will have to try it with my new Kakute F7 controller. Your mower is doing an awesome job.

  6. I've been playing in mission planner rover simulator and can't seem to get fence points circle to work. I created a simple back and forth waypoints then add a fence point in between but MP doesn't want to except the fence points – any advice would be helpful.

  7. I have the same problems with my rover and obstacle avoidance. Currently testing with a tfmini. I cannot upload a mission containing exclusion zones and fences. I tried setting it to mavlink2 like you said, but still get an error that they are not supported.

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