The one thing I wish my Mavic Pro could do

Robert Leigh · Sep 5, 2017

There's one thing that I think would make flying the Mavic Pro really exciting, and you'd think it would be easy to achieve, but it seems it's not available.

I'm talking about a way of helping it look after itself when it's on a waypoint mission. I often plan missions over countryside that has lots of trees, and due to the terrain, I can easily lose contact with the craft now and then. So for this reason, I have to ensure that the entire route is WAY higher than the tallest trees (I usually choose 250ft and use Litchi's 'relative to ground' feature to compensate for rising terrain).

Trouble is, the landscape from 250ft is pretty boring. It would be great if the Mavic could fly low enough to (very occasionally) risk clipping the top of a tree, but could use collision avoidance to safeguard it. I'd like to be able to program Litchi or another control app to stop and back up a few feet if it met an obstacle on a waypoint mission, rise to a predetermined altitude and then return to home. It doesn't seem too much to ask.

Kilrah · Sep 5, 2017

You don't want that since collision avoidance isn't really to be expected to work every time. I'd roughly guess it would not detect a tree in maybe 10-30% of cases.

You should rather program your mission with the right altitudes along the way to always be 30ft or so higher than the trees and you'd be good.

whiskeylover · Sep 5, 2017

If it flies without any contact with the controller, it could be considered an autonomous craft, and I'm not sure what the laws/rules are regarding those. And then there are those liability issues as well.

Brojon · Sep 7, 2017

You can set you waypoint missions to be relative to the actual terrain height on the device. You have to do this on the device since mission hub doesn't have the functionality.