Dear all,
yesterday my beautiful hexacopter crashed from a 30m altitude. I'm pretty sure all of you know the feeling, and it's part of this hobby. I'm going to fix this, however I'd love to have some insights of why this happened. You know, just to avoid spending another $3/400 dollars or so for the same reasons. :)
We programmed a very simple mission in the mission planner: 3 endpoints, and then on the last endpoint loiter forever.
I:
- made the hexa take off
- put it in loiter mode
- started the mission from the planner.
Once the mission was over and the hexa was in 'loiter forever', I switched mode on my remote from loiter to stabilize, then back to loiter, so that I could take control of it, then made it come near me to try the mission again.
So I started the mission again. This second time, however, when the mission was over and I switched mode on my remote from loiter to stabilize, then back to loiter, the hexacopter instantly fell down like a stone. It looked like if the power had been turned off the minute I switched modes, and it just went down vertically without control.
So sad.
I've attached the last 3 logs of the flights, the last one is when it crashed. Can someone please give me some hints on what went bad? I would love to start doing this again, but without an understanding of what happened I'd feel that this might as well happen again.
Some additional details of the hexa configuration are in the image snapshot attached. I was using arducopter 3.0.0-rc5.
Thank you in advance..
r.
Replies
My 2c's worth: I'm afraid it looks like you ran out of battery, your voltage at it's lowest (9.64V) aligns with the rapid drop in relative altitude. There's also a voltage spike right at the end typical when ESC's cut off removing the load.
You got the loiter/Althold/Auto/guided bug. Keep the throttle at center
We might be talking different symptoms then. Mine was more of a very fast descent into the ground instead of a hard cutoff. The motors were still active the whole time.
I had basically the same thing happen last Friday using v3.0 rc5. After an autonomous takeoff, my quad made it past three of six waypoints before dropping 50m into the ground. Luckily it was a relatively controlled drop into thick grass, so there was no damage.
2013-06-14 13-34-54.tlog
vlcsnap-2013-06-12-16h37m30s210.png