Drone Following #2: Learning to Fly

This isn't a terribly programming heavy post, but it is essential to working with and understanding with something that flies-- especially with four rotors. I took my Drone out for its first flight, which was mostly successful. I didn't understand that there was actually quite a bit of settings to configure before flying, but even under less than optimal circumstances it performed quite well.


The battery life of these devices really isn't that developed yet, but because this is the POWER EDITION, it has high density batteries that boost it close to an hour. In terms of the settings, there's a few key ones to how you'll be flying the drone. Most important is the maximum tilt. This value determines what the acceptable amount of tilt is for the drone. However, this also affects your maximum speed, since, in order to stop, the device may have to tilt past the acceptable limit. Also important is the maximum rotation, which has essentially the same properties, but for rotational properties like turning. These two facts combined essentially form kind of an overall sensitivity. It's pretty difficult to crash and burn when both the tilt and rotation are turned down, so keep that in mind. If you're filming or trying to get shots with the onboard camera, I'd suggest this kind of setting, but I imagine with an external camera (attached to the USB port) like the GoPro, it's probably not too much of a problem.

There's also a set of lighter features that are good for optimizing your style of flight. Drones can be flown indoors and outdoors, so you there are flip switchs for things like where you're flying, which of the styrofoam hulls you're using, and then a few more gauges like maximum altitude (up to 100 feet), max vertical speed (how fast the drone raises and lowers, etc) and a few others. Before I begin experimenting I want to fly quite a bit to better how understand what behaviors the drone can tolerate, and what settings would best permit these behaviors. Whereas the app requires you open a menu (while flying D: ), whereas on ROS you could probably easily manipulate these settings on the fly.

Plus that, there's a few novelties such as flips (can be enabled over 30% battery) and "absolute control" (where it spins around and then you can move it relative to where you are), but I've not discovered any pleasing features.

I hope to log in a decent amount of hours flying, and, more importantly, safely landing before I proceed to use the driver. I'll try to make some of my videos and pictures available so you can maybe determine if you'd like one in the future.