Landing drone flips over and will not turn off?

Posted by Kris Kitchen on April 11, 2015 at 11:45am

Landing RTL drone flips over ( stupid mole hill, or grass) and will not turn off. This happened to me on a landing a few times. The device will flip over and continues running, I cannot shut it off.  I use down to the left, no dice in any mode. It finally killed itself. Is there a way to program a death switch? The last time it ate up a pair of blades.

I have had this happen a few times, on 2 separate drones. 

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Replies

  • Rob_Lefebvre April 16, 2015 at 10:39am

    Just to be perfectly clear.  Kris's initial tip over was apparently caused by landing on a mole-hill or grass.

    After that, the problem was that the copter did not flip over completely.  It was only tilted at 45 degrees, or at least that's what the system thought.  So the crash detector will not fire at this angle.  If it did, copters would be falling out of the sky constantly.

    Then, due to extreme vibrations, presumably from the propellers striking the ground, the copter actually thought it was flying again.  The inertial system was messed up, which is unavailable with those vibration levels.  Then, there were attempts to disarm the copter while it was in Loiter mode while it thought it was flying.  The system will not disarm in auto modes while it thinks it is flying.  Again, if it did, then they would be falling out of the sky constantly.

    This is the balance that we are forced to make.

    The propllers could have been stopped very quickly by changing to stabilize mode and disarming.  It always accepts disarm commands in Stabilize and Acro modes.

    • Kris Kitchen > Rob_Lefebvre April 22, 2015 at 5:29am

      Put in a threshold if under 1 meter, kill switch after x vibration threshold is detected. 

    • Gustav Kuhn > Rob_Lefebvre April 16, 2015 at 11:00am

      RTFM ?

      :-)

  • Developer
    Randy April 15, 2015 at 5:29pm

    Rob Lefebvre is working on a kill switch feature that can be triggered from a ch7/ch8 switch.  That might make it into AC3.3.

    AC3.3 will also include a more sensitive landing check.  It's a bit of a balance because as we make the landing checks more sensitive we have to be extremely careful not to allow false-positives (i.e. disarm in the air) 'cuz nobody likes those!

    • Mike Boland > Randy April 20, 2015 at 12:56pm

      3.2.1 has real issues with it's landing checks, and I am having to revert to 3.1.5 which was working perfectly.

      This is on APM2.6 boards in production Hex's, that have been working fine on older FW, but having one in to work on I decided to update. Stupid me.

      It literally 'hunts' on touchdown, producing a bouncing action that may or may not touch the ground.

      Combine this with any lateral movement and we get a classic flip on landing.

      3.1.5 did not do this and planted itself nicely.

  • Kris Kitchen April 12, 2015 at 4:40pm

    Thank you Sir!

  • Andy Piper April 12, 2015 at 12:25pm

    https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot/issues/2068

    You are not alone. I'm not at all convinced that its by design.

    • Tim Carter > Andy Piper April 12, 2015 at 7:58pm

      Ok, how about an "it's landed" switch that will let the iris know, before it does, that it is in fact on the ground?

      ps... I did get mine back in the air today :[)

  • This reply was deleted.
    • Tim Carter April 11, 2015 at 8:13pm

      Maybe this is the answer! Turn the legs into handles....

    • Kris Kitchen > Tim Carter April 12, 2015 at 1:01pm

      Thats a Crazy idea! I am literally going to design them now. 

This reply was deleted.