Pushing the wrong button: Bad button placement leads to drone crashes
From Ars Technica
Unmanned aircraft crash. In fact, they crash a lot—though there's no recent specific data, the Congressional Research Service reported last year that despite improvements "the accident rate for unmanned aircraft is still far above that of manned aircraft." And while many of those accidents can be attributed to hostile fire or terrible flight conditions, a significant percentage of drone crashes is caused by human error. A December 2004 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) study of Defense Department drone crashes found human factors to be a causal factor in about a third of the cases the researchers examined.
But as four human factors engineering researchers have found, sometimes the accidents are by design. That is, the design of the systems that operators use to fly the drones are so bad that they invite accidents. A recent Ergonomics in Design article reported that a small but significant number of crashes could be directly attributed to bad ergonomics on ground control station hardware. These factors may have played a major part in crashes that were attributed to other causes.
Take, for example, one drone crash in 2006. As the operator brought the drone in for a landing, he meant to flip the landing gear button on the control joystick but accidentally hit the nearby ignition switch instead—shutting off the engine in mid-flight. The $1.5 million drone plummeted to the ground, a total loss. On another occasion, glare on a screen was so bad that a drone operator couldn't read an alert and mistook it for a landing signal—again killing the engines before the drone had landed.
Read more here
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Comment by Jack Crossfire on March 1, 2013 at 4:18pm -
No mention of sense & avoid in this article.
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Comment by Jared S on March 1, 2013 at 4:26pm -
Looks like a powered paraglider. Anyone have any info?
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Developer Comment by R_Lefebvre on March 1, 2013 at 4:28pm -
No surprise here. This is why I don't like Hobby Tx. Just a bunch of nondescript switches and knobs puked up on a box with no design layout at all. The only design effort that seems to be done is to figure out just how many switches and knobs they can possibly cram onto a single box.
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Comment by Matt on March 1, 2013 at 5:00pm -
Its a SnowGoose for delivering cargo:
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Developer Comment by John Arne Birkeland on March 1, 2013 at 5:01pm -
I kinda have to disagree R. The "cramped" TX design is so that you can reach every switch while holding the radio, so that you can keep your eyes on the R/C airplane/helicopter at all times. An experienced R/C pilot has no problem operating an R/C radio blindly.
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Comment by Max on March 1, 2013 at 6:13pm -
OMG! I didnt see the guy crouched down next to the fuse to start with, I assumed it was a little 2M wingspan type setup at first glance... DAMN!
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Comment by Carl La France on March 1, 2013 at 8:08pm -
When the operator makes a bad move can't the $$$$$$$ drone figure it out and RTL on it's own?Aren't they getting smarter all the time ?
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Comment by Jared S on March 1, 2013 at 8:13pm
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Because then the operator says "what's it doing now?" Which isn't always a good thing.
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Comment by Andy on March 1, 2013 at 8:31pm -
Thanks for posting this. Though the success of the R/C radio is self-evident, I believe it breaks down as taskings become more challenging. The tiny displays, the inability to add new features without significant time lag, and the tie to a particular manufacturer, among many others, are too limiting for me. And the controls aren't intuitive, and don't become intuitive, without a substantial investment of time (as John alluded to). I did have a LOL moment when reading the comments from the ars technica link (and I promise not to incorporate such a feature in my project):
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Comment by Carl La France on March 1, 2013 at 9:11pm
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Thumbs up! Andy! wings stay on!
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