Unless I'm mistaken I feel that diydrones would rather all flights use a Tx, but are we not very close to a point where we can to put an end of the Tx for drone multirotors as the primary flying device. After all this is 'diydrones' not 'diyrc' and a Tx is just not very drone like.
I know there are some bad a$$ flyers out there, but for me I want more of a drone and less of an RC.
Push a button, take off, do a mission and return back home and autoland, use virtual controls if needed, more drone like.
With all the new functionality from that Arthur Benemann has packed into the latest droid planner 2, including 1 button take offs, follow me, dronie, guided and large screen phones and tablets it looks like we may be close. All the strides that DJI and Parrot has done with virtual joysticks that are extremely accurate cant we get away from requiring the Tx.
We have geofence RTL, battery low RTL and tons of failsafes, we have continue mission if lost signal for those long missions.
The Tx is a great backup to the phone, but I have no backup for my Tx anyhow so why would I need a backup for my phone/tablet. If battery on phone dies it can return launch.
Somehow the new Ghost is not even requiring a Tx at all.
Just my thoughts as id like to say bye forever of the requirement of a Tx :-)
Replies
To be honest I really expected more from this community, except the one glimmer of hope from Randy that implied it will happen one day but we are not there yet, and that I fully accept because were not. But it is obvious there is an overwhelming old school attitude in this community that we use a Tx and thats just the way it is and there is nothing better or safer, this attitude will surely let in an opportunity for another company to make something better and safer than the Trad Tx and do it better than 3DR in the future.
With this thread I had hoped to let us use our imagination to maybe come up with something better than the traditional Tx.
Then I hear things like this from @Chim
"The idea of abandoning the trad Tx and thereby avoiding having to learn to fly is a fail-fail. "
This is so close minded, what about the doctors in Africa that will want to send drones into hard to reach or infected places or zones of outlaws, why does he need to know how to fly or know more than basics to get it down and so what if he uses a virtual joystick. There will be supplies sent from troops that will press a button to send there drone off to another troop to help with supplies, and one day these people may use software made right here at diy, all I ask is please don't be so closed minded.
We should be a community of innovation and ideas, I'm not talking about someone using this to just take a selfie, why should a farmer that has 20 acres 5 years from now need to have a traditional Tx to monitor his crops 100 ft off the ground. To think that everyone will need to know how to fly the traditional way 5 years from now is absurd, I have been flying for 20 years and I know there are real world needs for no traditional Tx solutions in the future and now.
None the less I still have hope one day we can get away from the traditional Tx requirement and something better and safer come will be created but it does not sound like it will come from here, unfortunately.
...all these 'fly aways' and complaints from the FAA have 'zero' to do with using or not using Trad Tx, all these "NAZA" and other fly aways are because of bad flight controllers design, firmware, GPS and other issues as phantoms have RTL on loss of signal also out of the box, phantoms require a Trad Tx. Fact is 99%, if not 100%, of all recent FAA complaints were all launched using a Trad Tx not a ground station.
> saw one come crashing into the hood of a car recently with nobody around. Never found the pilot.
But a game controller or a joystick can be a way to fly too...take that guy in your parking lot example...guess what he was using...a trad Tx...so I don't see where it helps keep the public safe from people that can't fly or can't fly well, rewind and now lets take the same guy were using DroidPlanner 2 that probably would have never happened. Just because you require a steering wheel on a car does not mean someone knows how to use it. In fact I see drivers every day that I wish to God they were required to use a Google car just as I see youtube videos of people that should not be allowed to use a Trad X ;-)
I think that's a little unfair Edgar... there are indeed many directions being taken by people within this community that I expect will one day lead to freedom from the Tx. I don't though believe that it will be a replacement of the Tx, such as virtual joysticks on a tablet, or some other recreation of the concept, such as Parrot's custom setup. Rather, it will be a complete lack of the need for a physical pilot interface because there's nothing the pilot could do that the aircraft couldn't do itself, only faster and more precise and with a better understanding of the safety margins involved.
I work in this area of robotics and am already working on "throw and go" products that don't require any technical expertise or piloting skill to operate. Obviously we have technical boundaries that will restrict this somewhat, at least for the next few years, however (at least in Australia) we don't have legislative boundaries that prevent a (qualified) person from operating a completely autonomous aerial vehicle. This is the real challenge in autonomy... not that we cannot have autonomous vehicles, but that we understand their limitations and don't deploy them into situations in which those limitations would lead to failures or critical outcomes for people or property.
Please don't judge us all harshly simply because we don't necessarily engage in a conversation in a way that you hope... that's the nature of the internet... it never gives you the answer you want (or necessarily the answer you expect).
Richard,
I have a NAZA and an APM and I love my APM more :-D....if you came here for robotics you came to the right place. You can do a fully autonomous flight from start to end with the DroidPlanner, but you need to have a Tx installed and should be on because its required. If you have a perfect flight with droid planner in a big field away from people where it lands without incident you never have to turn it on. Its the requirement of the Tx that comes to question as it kinda closes the door for other development in my eyes, when there are other options out there for manual control just to get a safe landing.
Ed,
If you've got the math and developers skills to teach the Pixhawk to introduce the two extra motors in their configurations, you should be able to get it to accept the two pusher motors.
Start at https://pixhawk.org/dev/nuttx/building_and_flashing to programming in the Pixhawk's NuttX RTOS (Real-Time Operating System).
You need linear algebra to add the new motor's thrust vectors and some calculus for the PID and motor failsafe calculations.
You clearly couldn't google for it yourself, so I'm wondering, what is your background?
Hi Randy,
Thanks for the reply, thats great news. We are in the days of phones and tablets that are stable, fast cpu's, loads of memory, long battery life and highly accurate retina displays. With the amazing work you guys have done with the latest firmware and Mr. Benemann making the Droid Planner 2 I would think adding accurate virtual sticks to Benemanns app should be feasible.
The virtual joysticks could be a slide up from the bottom that takes a large portion of the screen for more accurate flying not just micro flying, even take full screen on newer versions of iOS and Android.
Another nice thing about a tablet that is using a ground module over your traditional Tx is that my Tx has a finite amount of functions I can set with switches, tablets can send a virtually unlimited amount of commands from a ground module.
Gary, yeah prob not the APM then :-)
Ed,
We've had this discussion about virtual joysticks before (about 2 years ago iirc) and they simply don't give the haptic feedback required for accurate flight control. Sure, you can develop quite good sensitivity with using them, but you lack the signal your brain needs (while it's looking at the aircraft) to know the position of the 'sticks' relative to neutral and thus the control problem is much, much harder.
Some have suggested that you use the internal accelerometers on the phone and attitude/rate estimation as an input signal for control... but unfortunately the accelerometers in the phone tend to be far lower quality than those in the IMU and prone to a lot of noise, making accurate state estimation difficult. Sure, there's more processing power available on the phone to run better estimators, but that also introduces more delay into the control loop, again, making the control problem harder.
The easiest solution is dedicated hardware for fine grain generation of the pilots input signal, that provides suitable haptic feedback and a range of functions to enable it to control a large range of craft... and that is currently (and has been for a long time) the R/C transmitter. If you can create something that has all of the functionality of this device, you've still only recreated something that already exists. I cannot see a phone or tablet doing this, or incorporating additional hardware to support this, simply because the market isn't there.
When we get to accurate voice control or gesture-based input, then maybe it'll be time to ditch the Tx... but we're a LONG way from that (in spite of the few lab demonstrations trying to demonstate progress in that direction).
Cheers,
Tim
@Chim: Well said
Much better than my earlier knee-jerk reaction.
I am by trade, an IT Developer of said laptops, tablets and smartphones, so the issues with bugs, crashes and hacking are things I am all too well aware of and, in fact, I do relate to the frustrations using a Tx.
However, a typical airline's 747 has even more sophisticated autopilot and a glass cockpit among it's other systems, but they are careful and thoughtfully segregated from all the other systems on board.
Smartphones and tablets have every function using one interface, one CPU and one antennae. The result is important and unimportant tasks have to -share- and in some cases (yes) compete for the same resource.
So if you get a phone call while your flying, the device automatically takes away CPU and resources from your flight, just to decide whether or not to deal with it. There are also concerns about the potential for viruses jumping on board causing more problems.
A separate Tx has none of those concerns and so will remain so.
Yes you can fly a drone from a tablet and for toys they work well to introduce someone to the skill needed for flying.
But on that 747, the stick remains and the pilots are guided to continue their self-discipline and self-reliance in piloting aircraft. One hopes that if those electronics go offline, the stick and the pilot's skill can still put it down safely.
A contest between two philosophies, easy of use vs security.
You -can- make it really easy to use, but if your tech fails, just how secure/safe is your flying?
Are you going to be responsible for the operation of your Apple smartphone flying your drone, when that company won't even let you pop the back-cover off to change the battery?
It may be moot in the end.
The FAA is currently recommending pilot's licenses for commercial drone piloting. Unless you want to spend 10x more on the pilot's license than what it costs for the drone itself (now, a Cessna actually costs about as much as a low-end ($13K) car to build, its the -other- costs that make it add up to more than $100K), you may end up hiring out for a drone pilot afterall.
Thanks Tim, love your feedback on haptic of a physical stick. And your right, virtual is not as accurate or give the feedback. But allowing flight without requiring one to bind to a Tx should on the radar as I feel we have came a long way in the past 2 years and don't feel that we are that long of a ways away. Of course we need to have enough manual control for a safe landing or fly it back is needed is all would be required, not to have granular control as say someone say sport flying.
There are a few solutions I have seen
DJI solution, basic virtual joysticks
Ghost that "seems" from what I read a way to "guide" the aircraft quad during land and flight.
And lastly the Parrot solution one that would cover haptic feedback but would require hardware
Although they use a proprietary device I would think a solution could be made that used a phone/tablet using the micro usb and an app like DroidPlanner. Parrots also commonly use sonar to help landing.
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