Example with multiple drones

[julianoes]

It would be good to provide an example how we can use the Python wrappers to connect to multiple drones at the same time.

It's a bit tricky because we need to run a mavsdk_server for each drone.

[JonasVautherin]

It's a bit tricky because we need to run a mavsdk_server for each drone.

Or maybe we should extend the API to support multiple drones like in MAVSDK-C++. We talked about that a while ago, if I remember correctly 😊.

[HanbumKo]

Is there any update?? Or is there any reference issue of this??

[julianoes]

No there is currently no update from our side as it is not our priority.

Would you be able to contribute/work on this?

[HanbumKo]

Yeah I could. But I need to understand this system and codes before doing this. Is there any additional development documentations of MAVSDK? Thanks.

[julianoes]

You have probably seen this? https://mavsdk.mavlink.io/develop/en/cpp/

Do you already understand the C++ API, gRPC backend and language frontends? If not I'd suggest to look at the C++ API first and see how multiple drones are working there.

[HanbumKo]

I'm not familiar with gRPC. OK let me see C++ API first and would do that. But now I've been focusing on other project, so I couldn't say 'I can!!'. Thanks!!

[traverseda]

It's a bit tricky because we need to run a mavsdk_server for each drone.

Or maybe we should extend the API to support multiple drones like in MAVSDK-C++. We talked about that a while ago, if I remember correctly blush.

So it looks to me like currently if you have several mavSDK systems on one ip/port (for example you're using qgroundcontrol's MAVlink forwarding) it picks a random device to communicate with. This is pretty surprising behavior and could easily be a safety issue. I suspect it gets weirder than that, but I didn't continue testing past that point.

Even just keeping the current system where you need multiple mavsdk_server's but allowing you to specify the system-id of the drone you're trying to communicate with would be a big improvement.

[JonasVautherin]

if you have several mavSDK systems on one ip/port

Assuming that the different systems have a different IP, you could write a simple demultiplexer that would redirect each drone (based on its ip) to a different mavsdk_server instance 👍.

[traverseda]

I believe that mavlink-router can accomplish this, it's still another jenga block on the tower though and makes it a fair bit harder to develop nice self-container apps that are reliable.