Plane Commands in Guided Mode

This article lists the MAVLink commands that affect the movement of a Plane or Quadplane. Normally these commands are sent by a ground station or Companion Computers often running DroneKit.

Note

The code which processes these commands can be found here in GCS_Mavlink.cpp

Movement commands

To command a plane to move to a particular lat, lon, alt send a MAV_CMD_NAV_WAYPOINT (16) within a MISSION_ITEM_INT with the following fields set as follows:

  • “current” = 2 to indicate that it is a guided mode “goto” message
  • “frame” = 0 or 3 for alt-above-sea-level, 6 for alt-above-home or 11 for alt-above-terrain
  • “x” = longitude * 1e7
  • “y” = latitude * 1e7
  • “z” = altitude in meters

Examples

Here are some example commands that can be copy-pasted into MAVProxy (aka SITL) to test this command. Before running these commands:

  • module load message
  • create an Auto mission (“wp editor”) with a NAV_TAKEOFF command with Alt of 100m
  • arm throttle
  • Auto (wait until vehicle begins circling)
  • GUIDED (and enter one of the commands below)
Example MAVProxy/SITL Command Description
message MISSION_ITEM_INT 0 0 0 0 16 2 0 0 0 0 0 -353621474 1491651746 700 fly to lat,lon of -35.36,149.16 and 700m above sea level
message MISSION_ITEM_INT 0 0 0 6 16 2 0 0 0 0 0 -353621474 1491651746 100 fly to lat,lon of -35.36,149.16 and 100m above home
message MISSION_ITEM_INT 0 0 0 11 16 2 0 0 0 0 0 -353621474 1491651746 100 fly to lat,lon of -35.36,149.16 and 100m above terrain

MAV_CMDs

These MAV_CMDs can be processed if packaged within a COMMAND_LONG message

These MAV_CMDs can be processed if packaged within a COMMAND_INT message