Loiter at the last mission waypoint on mission end

[Luka-Filipovic]

Solved Problem

When the final mission waypoint is reached, the navigator sets the loiter position setpoint to the current position instead of the mission’s intended waypoint.

As a result, the vehicle ends up loitering at the position where it entered the waypoint’s acceptance radius, instead at the waypoint itself.

Solution

On mission end, call setLoiterItemFromCurrentPositionSetpoint() if current position setpoint is of type SETPOINT_TYPE_POSITION

[DronecodeBot]

This pull request has been mentioned on Discussion Forum for PX4, Pixhawk, QGroundControl, MAVSDK, MAVLink. There might be relevant details there:

https://discuss.px4.io/t/px4-dev-call-oct-1-2025-team-sync-and-community-q-a/47561/2

[dagar]

This looks correct, can you comment on testing?

[MaEtUgR]

That makes sense 👍

[MaEtUgR]

if current position setpoint is of type SETPOINT_TYPE_POSITION

I assume the type used to always be loiter some time ago and after some changes it can now be a position and that's when it broke.

[Luka-Filipovic]

can you comment on testing?

SITL test with gz_x500

Top is before, bottom is after changes.
The time line points to the moment the last waypoint is reached. On the top one you can see that it makes the vehicle return back to the point where the item is reached.
On the bottom one it gently brakes to the desired waypoint.

---

I work only with multicopters, so I'm unsure how it affects vehicles such as VTOL, are they are allowed to loiter at the position setpoint.