First of all, sorry for the unexciting video. Waiting on my new gopro so I made do with an old keychain cam.
Flight went well! I was very impressed with the RTL performance straight out of the box. The Radian displayed much less of a tendency to wander than the 6' Telemaster I had flown with APM before. I will take a stab at tweaking the gains. This first image is just the RTL flight and the next one is all the flight data.
Before landing, the plane didn't want to come out of RTL mode, so a lot of frantic switch-toggling happened and eventually it came back. Not sure what the issue was.On the plane, I have the auxiliary antenna set up orthogonal to the main RX on board so antenna nulls shouldn't have been an issue....
Like I said, onboard video isn't great. RTL starts at about 2:17.
All in all, not a bad morning!
Comments
Hey Nick, I know how contentious airspace can be, it almost makes me give up hope to see it all laid out :)
In my defense, Greg, I've had this plane for the better part of a year and have many hours on it. This was just the first flight with an ardupilot onboard. I've also been flying the ardupilot since version 1 on a number of other platforms. Could I have picked a better place? Absolutely! Wil l fly here again? Not autonomously! I think there are two issues... The first being airspace, the second being plowing into someone's apartment window if something were to go wrong. The airspace issue is tricky but I think being more than 3mi from an airport, staying under 400', and keeping an eye (and ear) out for any full scale aircraft is not ridiculous. As for having the autopilot brick itself, send the plane down onto a road and cause an accident... i think thats a much more serious issue and probably the best reason to not fly here again. But what about quads? would anyone balk at flying a quad around this park? I've read plenty of stories of people switching to RTL and never seeing their vehicles again...
Forget about Boston Logan and LifeFlight helipads for a moment. Do you really think this is a good place to do a first flight on a new plane.....? Geez,, what are we defending here anyway?
Boston, You bring up a good point. If you in a congested area, chances are there my be a hospital helipad some where. I would think that would count as an airport, especially due to the copters low altitude.
Eli, Ya I would have no problem flying a small parkflyer in the park, but you have an autonomous capable vehicle now. Put some open space around yourself when you fly. You can also set up geo fence in the mp.
Good points from a safety perspective. I'm used to flying small park flyers here and if anything goes wrong, they usually end up in the ground in a hurry. The Radian is a real floater so I can imagine it could go pretty far. I guess I didn't think I was in the wrong since I was under 400' and outside 3mi from Logan (I checked) and no one was around, but I see your point... I guess I put a lot of trust in the APM...
Nice flight, but dude! Find a safer place to fly than the middle of Cambridge. You are barely 3 mi from Boston Logan and you plane can easily fly there if if something goes wrong. If you have a problem and go down in the middle of a crowded city, you will end up desperately searching other peoples back yards which may result in a cal to the police of a suspicious person roaming the area with some kind of radio device. Do you really want to explain to them why you were fling an RC plane in the city.
Please use your head and follow the rules. We don't need the bad publicity.