John Martin:
“I made a flight plan with home and three way marks in my mission planner software. I have gone over the videos several times and I don’t know how to make the drone follow the flight plan. From what you say it seems that there must be a way to connect so that the drone just follows the flight plan. But what button do I press on the computer or the flight controller to make it go. How do I put the flight plan in mission planner into the drone?”
Hi there John!
It sounds like you’re trying to take advantage of the AUTO flight mode. With AUTO flight mode, you load a pre-configured mission to the drone. When you manually (or from Mission Planner) set the mode to AUTO (maybe from stabilize), the drone will run whatever mission is uploaded to the flight controller. THere is some really good documentation on how to get AUTO missions going at the ardupilot documentation at this link.
This is one type of autonomous flight mode.
The other is GUIDED flight mode, where you can command the drone to fly via MissionPlanner by clicking around on the map, or by programming it with a python dronekit script. With this mode, the flight mission may not be pre-configured and is more dynamic.