Anafi Ai instability

[Plathomson]

Hi everyone,


I’m developing an application with the Anafi AI in confined environments — specifically inside pipes.


I’m facing a major stability problem both in simulation and on the real drone:
I also post my problem on the parrot dev forum : forum.developer.parrot.com/t/visual-odometry-issue/28169
when the drone enters a pipe (similar to the one shown in the image), it becomes completely unstable and drifts in a random direction within the XY plane.
This drift happens both while hovering and during manual/automatic control, making precise operation very difficult.


It looks like some form of visual correction is kicking in, especially in environments with repeating or uniform textures.



Here are the tests I’ve done:

• Inside a pipe with poor/low-quality texture → the drone is stable.
• With high-definition texture → the instability appears again.
• I observe similar drift when flying above flat surfaces (no texture, good texture, or poor texture).
• Anafi 4K does not show this issue, neither in simulation nor real flights.
• Tested different control interfaces: SkyController, QDroneCtrl, Olympe, and AirSDK — the problem persists in all cases.

The issue appears to be specific to Anafi AI’s visual positioning/optical flow pipeline.


Has anyone experienced this behaviour?
Any insights on how to mitigate or disable the problematic corrections would be very helpful.


Thanks in advance.

 

[Plathomson]

Ps: I already see the doc about Obstacle Avoidance and i already disactivate it in olympe like that
self.node.declare_parameter("camera/stereo/obstacle_avoidance", False,
ParameterDescriptor(description="Enable obstacle avoidance"))

How does ANAFI Ai’s obstacle avoidance work? | Parrot support :
During automated flights, the drone manages its trajectory to keep the OA fully functional.

However, users must carefully plan and monitor their automated flights in the following conditions, as the OA might not work optimally.

• Dynamic (moving environments).
• In front of surfaces or objects that are:
  • monochrome (plain white or black, on any other color without distinct texture or motive)
  • reflective;
  • water based or transparent;
  • mobile;
  • very dark or very bright
• In areas where the lighting conditions change drastically or very rapidly.
• In rainy conditions

In my app, i should face condition where front surface are

• reflective
• monochrome (plain white or black, on any other color without distinct texture or motive)
• water
• very dark