Hi, I’ve been persisting with some time on a hexacopter project. My main motivation for using the hex frame was for redundancy in the case of a single motor/ESC/prop failure. I’ve had various failures and made various mistakes and one thing that has become increasingly clear is that ArduCopter can never recover control of a hexacopter that loses a single motor in flight. The copter invariably spirals and wobbles to it’s demise at the surface.
I’ve had a bit of a search here on the forum and I see some discussions about nobody really knowing what the expected behaviour really is when a motor fails.
I’d be very interested to hear anybody’s experiences with getting redundancy to work with a hexacopter, or is the only real benefit of a hexacopter the increased lift? Thanks!
In my case I got the…
2021-06-14 14:35:08.036 Error: Subsys THRUST_LOSS_CHECK ECode 1
2021-06-14 14:35:08.036 Potential Thrust Loss (6)
…messages.
And Leonard’s suggestion of an alternate motor configuration which should improve controllability.
I haven’t found a clearly written summary of what the requirements are to be able to land safely, but from a skim read a Y6 has better chances, you probably need at least a 3:1 thrust:weight and you’ll likely lose yaw control even in the best case. I expect this copter had enough thrust but it still crashed. I’ll need to read more closely through the threads, but I think the short answer is that maintaining control of a hexacopter with a failed motor is very difficult.
Hi David,
I lost one engine due to a mechanical failure from my hexacopter a few weeks ago and even though it wasn’t fully tuned, l managed to land safely.
If you like, I can try to find the bin log of this flight.
Great to hear Maarten. Do you have it set up in any special way, e.g. the PPNNPN motor pattern discussed in one of the Github issues I linked to above?
Just so your aware. Flying a hexa is no guarantee of a safe landing in the event of a single motor out. Well tuned or not. Sometimes the machine just isn’t happy with one motor out and things conspire against you.
Just putting it out there.
