I recently lost a 450 flamewheel clone running APM 2.6, AC 3.2.1 on a autonomous mission to a friend’s house. It just never made it to the destination, where it had flown 6x before with the same waypoints, commands, and params. The baro was protected and was never a problem previously. Set altitude of the entire path was 100m above Home, which was at least 30m above the highest obstruction enroute.
I did not recover the craft, and the crash could have been due to a number of reasons, but it caused me to wonder about the behavior in headwind conditions, as there was about a 5mph wind that day. I’m curious to know from developers about the control logic as well as pilots about any real-world experience with this.
If the copter has a set forward speed, tilt angle, and altitude on an auto mission, and meets a headwind, how will it respond when the motor output maxes out?
- increase tilt angle past limit to try to maintain speed
- decrease speed below setting
- attempt to maintain speed but lose altitude
I would like to think there is a command hierarchy which preserves altitude by diminishing speed, but I just don’t know. If the priority was speed, then I could see it simply diving to the ground, whether the tilt angle was respected or exceeded.
Here’s a .bin from a successful flight on this same route. It’s not the crash log, but may give some insight. Thank you!