Maintain a "pilot in control", which is to say that you must always be able to take manual control and fly the aircraft out of danger (in general, that means maintaining line-of-sight contact with the aircraft).
This is quoted from the Regulatory FAQ.
My question is - does this "manual control" need to be completely separate? I am using Arduinos and a data radio pair. The transmitting Arduino can send commands based on a joystick, which is my "traditional RC" mode. If my autonomous operation has a problem, there is a possibility that the running code has hit a bug and the controller may not respond to joystick commands. I am programming in safeguards (and this is not my first autonomous project; I have a working RC car and boat) but in some worst case scenarios the safeguards would just keep it from flying away and it would flutter to the ground (it is a light "foamie" disc design). Is this a violation of the regs?
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