An Orbit Trajectory

Have you ever wanted to fly a nice smooth circular orbit? This can be handy for capturing 3D objects from all sides especially if you get multiple orbits at different altitudes.

So the PythonClient folder contains a new script named Orbit that will do exactly that.

See demo video

The demo video was created by running this command line:

python orbit.py --radius 10 --altitude 5 --speed 1 --center "0,1" --iterations 1

This flies a 10 meter radius orbit around the center location at (startpos + radius * [0,1]), in other words, the center is located radius meters away in the direction of the provided center vector. It also keeps the front facing camera on the drone always pointing at the center of the circle. If you watch the flight using LogViewer you will see a nice circular pattern get traced out on the GPS map:

The core of the algorithm is not that complicated. At each point on the circle we look ahead by a small delta in degrees, called the lookahead_angle, where that angle is computed based on our desired velocity. We then find that lookahead point on the circle using sin/cosine and make that our "target point". computing the velocity then is easy, we just subtract our current position from that point and feed that into the AirSim method moveByVelocityZ.