Using Vision or Motion Capture systems

Info Before following the instructions below, ensure that your autopilot has a firmware version with the LPE modules enabled. The LPE version of the PX4 firmware can be found inside the zip file of the latest PX4 release or it can be built from source using a build command such as make px4fmu-v2_lpe. See Building the Code for more details.

This page aims at getting a PX4 based system using position data from sources other than GPS (such as motion capture systems like VICON and Optitrack and vision based estimation systems like ROVIO, SVO or PTAM )

Position estimates can be sent both from an onboard computer as well as from offboard (example : VICON). This data is used to update its local position estimate relative to the local origin. Heading from the vision/motion capture system can also be optionally integrated by the attitude estimator.

The system can then be used for applications such as position hold indoors or waypoint navigation based on vision.

For vision, the mavlink message used to send the pose data is VISION_POSITION_ESTIMATE and the message for all motion capture systems is ATT_POS_MOCAP messages.

The mavros ROS-Mavlink interface has default implementations to send these messages. They can also be sent using pure C/C++ code and direct use of the MAVLink library.

This feature has only been tested to work with the LPE estimator.

LPE Tuning for Vision or Mocap

Enabling external pose input

You need to set a few parameters (from QGroundControl or the NSH shell) to enable or disable vision/mocap usage in the system.

Set the system parameter ATT_EXT_HDG_M to 1 or 2 to enable external heading integration. Setting it to 1 will cause vision to be used, while 2 enables mocap heading use.

Vision integration is enabled by default in LPE. You can control this using theLPE_FUSION parameter in QGroundControl. Make sure that "fuse vision position" is checked.

Disabling barometer fusion

If a highly accurate altitude is already available from vision or mocap information, it may be useful to disable the baro correction in LPE to reduce drift on the Z axis.

There is a bit field for this in the parameter LPE_FUSION, which you can set from QGroundControl. Just uncheck "fuse baro".

Tuning noise parameters

If your vision or mocap data is highly accurate, and you just want the estimator to track it tightly, you should reduce the standard deviation parameters, LPE_VIS_XY and LPE_VIS_Z (for vision) or LPE_VIC_P (for motion capture). Reducing them will cause the estimator to trust the incoming pose estimate more. You may need to set them lower than the allowed minimum and force-save.