I sent my Hobbyking SkyEye on a 7 mile flight over the Susses countryside and a reservoir. All was fine until literally the last way point when it descended about 20’ and got stuck in a very tall tree at the point of the waypoint. I’ve checked in Mission Planner and the next way point (the last) was 10 meters lower.
Instead of a gradual descent to the next it seemed to drop rapidly.
I’ve noticed that it does this on all climbs and descents - it climbs or descends steeply then levels out instead of descending gradually. Is this how it is supposed to control altitude or can I change this?
Do you have EKF enabled? I’ve found that plane does a vastly better job of maintaining altitude with EKF than without, especially during sharp turns.
Make sure your airspeed sensor is well calibrated and not affected by turning as the plane will descend to increase speed if it thinks it has slowed down in the turn. The amount of that is based on your setting for TECS_SPDWEIGHT.
I don’t believe it should start to change altitude for the next way-point before it reaches the current one, but remember it “reaches” a way-point as soon as it’s within your WP_RADIUS of it. If you have a sharp turn with altitude change immediately after a way-point it will start to turn and descend as soon as it’s within WP_RADIUS of the current one.
This controls the minimum altitude change for a waypoint before a glide slope will be used instead of an immediate altitude change. The default value is 15 meters, which helps to smooth out waypoint missions where small altitude changes happen near waypoints. If you don’t want glide slopes to be used in missions then you can set this to zero, which will disable glide slope calculations. Otherwise you can set it to a minimum number of meters of altitude error to the destination waypoint before a glide slope will be used to change altitude.[/quote]