Suppose I plan and successfully fly a mission. The next day I am10 miles away, I arm the copter (thereby setting a new Home location) and accidently switch into Auto. My question is whether or not Arducopter will check the distance from the new Home position to the first waypoint in my previous mission, or will the copter take off and immediately try to fly 10 miles to the previous mission’s waypoint#1 ? If I had set up a fence around my previous mission, what would the copter do when set to Auto at the new position (way outside the fence)? Would it just try to land where it took off from? Is it possible to add a feature that checks the new Home position? My fear is that I could accidently (and yes, stupidly) trigger a runaway. I’d appreciate any advice someone could offer. Tnx,
It will fly to the coordinate of the 1st Waypoint. What else can it do, Waypoints are fixed coordinates.
Use a Fence!
Thank you for your very quick response. I will indeed use a fence for each mission. I don’t know if this forum is the proper location, but I would like to offer a suggestion. When flying an Auto mission, Arducopter could be programed to check the separation between the MP’s indicated Home, and the true GPS Home that is determined at arming. This distance check could be adjusted by a parameter, say Auto_Home_Chk, where a value of 0 means do not check. If I set this parameter to 100 m, then it would never interfere with normal operation but, if I was excessively far away, and I accidently started a mission, then the copter would not take off. Arducopter checks for many, many conditions to avoid catastrophic problems do to User error, and I suggest that this would be an appropriate additional check. Thanks for your help.
You are not the first to suggest this, and it is already in the issues database. But so far no one added that feature because fence limitations are just enough. They do the job and are available now.
This can be achieved via Lua scripting for now FYI.