MP1 crashed during a pix4Dcapture flight...

[TomNav]

Hi,

I crashed my MP1 in a tree during an automated flight using Pix4Dcapture v4.5.0 (Android). While my drone was heading to the start point, I swapped the screen to FPV and noticed a tree slightly too high (2m max) was right in the way (Bad planning... my bad). Using the RC I tried to rapidly increased altitude but the drone did not react... I managed to stop the drone moving closer (a bit in a panic move) and tried to cancel the automated flight but by the time I pressed the abort button (not on the FPV screen...), the drone had started moving toward the start point and crashed into the tree and felt down. I very surprised the drone did not climb up at all (Max flight altitude was 500m), which would have prevent the crash. I'm also surprised of a first flight anomaly at 35sec: drone seems to stop and drift a bit before moving again. I have replayed the flight in Airdata but can't fully explain why it never climbed.
Would one of you could look at the flight records (attached) and kindly give me some clues of what happened?

Cheers
TomNav

 

[brett8883]

Hi,

I crashed my MP1 in a tree during an automated flight using Pix4Dcapture v4.5.0 (Android). While my drone was heading to the start point, I swapped the screen to FPV and noticed a tree slightly too high (2m max) was right in the way (Bad planning... my bad). Using the RC I tried to rapidly increased altitude but the drone did not react... I managed to stop the drone moving closer (a bit in a panic move) and tried to cancel the automated flight but by the time I pressed the abort button (not on the FPV screen...), the drone had started moving toward the start point and crashed into the tree and felt down. I very surprised the drone did not climb up at all (Max flight altitude was 500m), which would have prevent the crash. I'm also surprised of a first flight anomaly at 35sec: drone seems to stop and drift a bit before moving again. I have replayed the flight in Airdata but can't fully explain why it never climbed.
Would one of you could look at the flight records (attached) and kindly give me some clues of what happened?

Cheers
TomNav

Well if it’s in a waypoint mission then it’s not going to respond to the control sticks. This is expected behavior.

In the future, besides planning your routes better, you can switch the flight mode switch to Sport mode to immediately cancel automated flight or even better for a case like this press the pause button to cancel automated flight and put on the emergency brake to come to an abrupt and immediate stop.

Lesson learned. You’ll be a better pilot for it now. Whenever in automated flight be ready to push that pause button of Sport mode switch at all times. Don’t use the on screen buttons as this will cause a bad habit because you don’t want to rely on those buttons since they won’t always work.

 

[sar104]

It did ignore your stick inputs:







It may well be correct that you need to cancel the mission before you can regain manual control. That's not the case with Litchi, but perhaps this app is different.

 

[TomNav]

Well if it’s in a waypoint mission then it’s not going to respond to the control sticks. This is expected behavior.

In the future, besides planning your routes better, you can switch the flight mode switch to Sport mode to immediately cancel automated flight or even better for a case like this press the pause button to cancel automated flight and put on the emergency brake to come to an abrupt and immediate stop.

Lesson learned. You’ll be a better pilot for it now. Whenever in automated flight be ready to push that pause button of Sport mode switch at all times. Don’t use the on screen buttons as this will cause a bad habit because you don’t want to rely on those buttons since they won’t always work.

Fair enough, I'll be more careful, and yes I thought about the pause button afterward... just never had to use it before.

 

[TomNav]

It did ignore your stick inputs:

View attachment 82809



View attachment 82808

It may well be correct that you need to cancel the mission before you can regain manual control. That's not the case with Litchi, but perhaps this app is different.

Thanks for looking into this. What puzzled me is why I managed to regain some sort of control on the horizontal movements but nothing on the vertical ones. It did react to some of the RC commands but ignored the up command. Even when the drone decided to land (e.g. battery low voltage error) we still have some control.
Also, before the incident at 35sec, there's a short stop and drift that I can't explain... wasn't me.
This was a brand new drone (3rd flight) and during the 2 first flights (manual theses ones) I had a strange feeling compare to my previous Mavic Pro, felt like it had some sort of latency in taking commands, sometimes.

 

[brett8883]

It did ignore your stick inputs:

View attachment 82809



View attachment 82808

It may well be correct that you need to cancel the mission before you can regain manual control. That's not the case with Litchi, but perhaps this app is different.

This didn’t sound right to me so I just tried it and Litchi nor DJI Go 4 nor Pix4DCapture will allow throttle inputs during a waypoints mission for MP1. It allows rudder input depending on your heading settings and you can increase flight speed or decrease flight speed with the controller sticks but throttle and aileron inputs are ignored. AutoPilot might let you tweak a mission in progress but that of course cause they use joystick mode for everything.

Maybe it’s different for the M2 idk.

 

[sar104]

This didn’t sound right to me so I just tried it and Litchi nor DJI Go 4 nor Pix4DCapture will allow throttle inputs during a waypoints mission for MP1. It allows rudder input depending on your heading settings and you can increase flight speed or decrease flight speed with the controller sticks but throttle and aileron inputs are ignored. AutoPilot might let you tweak a mission in progress but that of course cause they use joystick mode for everything.

Maybe it’s different for the M2 idk.

Not sure - but I've run at least one waypoint mission where there was a waypoint elevation error that I realized was going to run it into the ground. It responded to stick controls when I applied back elevator to stop it and throttle to climb.

 

[brett8883]

Not sure - but I've run at least one waypoint mission where there was a waypoint elevation error that I realized was going to run it into the ground. It responded to stick controls when I applied back elevator to stop it and throttle to climb.

Hmm... I wonder if between two waypoints of differing height it will allow you to change when it ascends or descends between those to waypoints. I didn’t try that. In Pix4DCapture the waypoints are always the same height so it definitely won’t allow it there but I’ll try between two different height waypoints