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RTH when battery low question

timonoj

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Jul 18, 2017
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Hi guys,

I'm a more or less safe pilot, and whenever see the battery is running low I promptly return home. However I've seen some people mentioning RTH taking over and actually crashing their drones. So, for the speficic scenario of returning due to low battery, which I intend to follow manually anyway on all occasions, would you recommend to disable it to avoid some unexpected control takeover?

I'm perfectly cool with the failsafe option, as it did indeed save me a couple of times, and I intend to keep that on at all cost. But I just wouldn't like the drone to skip my own control because of some unexpected reason.

Thanks!
 
It'll only land once the battery reaches critical level. You can still use the cyclic control to move to a safer location as she comes down, but once it's critically low you cannot cancel out of that landing process.
You can cancel out of RTH by doing so within the app on screen or, by cycling through Sport mode.
 
I wouldn't disable the Auto-RTH feature. Just make sure that the RTH altitude is set high enough to clear any potential obstacles.
 
I've cancelled RTH on many occasions, those being when I knew I goofed around a lot on the way out and I knew the route to home is shorter or when I knew I was flying into a strong head wind and the power used on the way back would be less. That said, I respect the RTH calculations when it flashes on the screen and simply consider if the power I've used to that point leaves enough to get home. I have my low battery set at 30% and critical set to 20%. This last trip, on one of the flights, I landed (hand caught by crew) at 17% after flying almost 4 kilometers away. I had disabled the RTH warning. While I suspected I'd make it back, I was still a bit scared. In short, you can disable RTH when you recognize the various conditions that tell you to RTH now or to know that you have a bit of room to work with.
 
... However I've seen some people mentioning RTH taking over and actually crashing their drones. So, for the speficic scenario of returning due to low battery, which I intend to follow manually anyway on all occasions, would you recommend to disable it to avoid some unexpected control takeover?...
I have seen a lot of crash videos and one common problem with RTH is it is based on an estimate of remaining battery life and the distance of the Mavic to the RC. It does not take into account the wind direction and speed. They don't notice their higher than normal speed out, keep going until RTH kicks in, then find they are fighting a headwind on the way back and don't make it. That or they did not enter the correct RTH settings so it did not make it back. Then they blame RTH for crashing their drone.

A bit long-winded but the point is RTH is a feature that can save your Mavic. You can activate it any time to get it started back and then take over to stop that irritating beeping. Just set it correctly and watch your air speed and you will be fine.
 
I've triggered RTH a few times. Lost VLOS and my bearing to home position. Wait till my drone has turned and started to fly home, I cancel RTH and manually fly home. It's a lot quicker than spinning around trying to find the right bearing. I did this only with my Spark. With Mavic, the map has the green line to indicate bearing to home, so never had to trigger RTH.
If my Mavic is a distance away, I would start heading back at around 40% battery. I can still fly around nearby and land at around 30%.
And I usually fly above the tree line. No obstacles between my Mavic and RC. Don't really need to worry about RTH altitude, since it doesn't descend to RTH height when RTH is triggered.
 
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