It sucks, but the behavior is perfectly normal and expected. Once you start the motors the slightest rocking of the boat which causes the drone to get lower will make it consider it's in flight and add power to maintain the original height.
It sucks, but the behavior is perfectly normal and expected. Once you start the motors the slightest rocking of the boat which causes the drone to get lower will make it consider it's in flight and add power to maintain the original height. And since it's in GPS mode, also it's position so if the boat moves you move into the now stationary aircraft.
A drone you want to use from a boat should not be in GPS mode, but should have ATTI mode available. That makes the Mavic a poor choice, unless you use the available tricks to enable it.
NO!ATTI mode will prevent the attempt to hold position but that isn't necessarily an improvement. Instead it is going to set pitch and roll to zero, which means zero airspeed.
NO!
Zero pitch/roll does NOT mean zero airspeed, it means "continue on your drift" aka no acceleration, or just "do nothing". When taking off from a boat moving at 5mph in ATTI mode the aircraft is moving at 5mph with the boat, and when lifting off it just stays flat and basically continues to mostly fly in the same direction at the same 5mph, only the little bit of airframe drag, wind influence and attitude imprecisions will (slowly) affect it, which is MUCH easier to correct for with small inputs. Most importantly the aircraft will not do any action/movement of its own.
In GPS as soon as the aircraft considers it has taken off it will do everything it can to enforce the ground speed requested by the stick, even if that means going full power against you or the boat, it's fast and it's very hard for you to quickly find the right stick input to give to have it follow the correct direction and speed of the boat. You absolutely do not want that.
Slow is relative of course but what matters is that passively drifting to zero is MUCH slower than the aircraft actively fighting to reach zero ASAP.the aircraft airspeed asymptotes to zero, that transition is not slow.
Slow is relative of course but what matters is that passively drifting to zero is MUCH slower than the aircraft actively fighting to reach zero ASAP.
ATTI drifts to zero in a few seconds at low power giving you time to react, GPS does it in half a second at high power which you can't react to and can cause a lot more damage. The difference is a smooth takeoff/landing with a bit of training or the situation in the OP which you can't really train for.
I've been doing boat shoots for 2 seasons with a Phantom. ATTI is a piece of cake, GPS is really dangerous.
In ATTI when you come to land you give it the right direction/speed plus a little, you can let the stick go and catch without issue while it's still gliding smoothly next to you. Try that with GPS - the instant you let go of the stick it's gone. Same with launch, in ATTI you can safely hold it for ever while it's already in the air until you're ready without giving any input, and when you let go you have no problem to get to the stick and start flying it before it's slowed down too much to become an issue.
I would say that these really are not the kind of toys to play with without wearing the proper gear.Set up my M2p on a long tail boat in Thailand. And as soon as I started the propellers it immediately flew backwards between my feet and cut me up
Anyone else faced this kind of issue?