High Speed Auto Missions

Has anyone tried doing very fast auto missions w/ their racers?

I have been trying to, and it doesn’t go as fast in auto, as manual.
I have set the “Speed”, “speed up”, “speed down”, etc parameters for higher speeds, but it is not reaching them.
The last time I really focused on the issue I was just trying to get “speed up” to go faster.
In manual modes, I know I can get to at least 20 meters per second.
I set the speed up parameter to 10 meters per second.
The copter only reaches about 6 meters per second on a mission.

Has anyone else noticed anything similar? Or has anyone else been successful in reaching high speeds in auto missions?

I did 16 m/s reliably on a 1.3km oval course (14 m/s average over 15 laps, including takeoff and landing). The copter was probably the opposite of a racer (15" props, 3.5kg, >50min endurance). I have to admit that I have no idea what speed the copter could do in Stabilize, but that day was rather windy (25kt gusts), so I guess it can reach about twice that speed.

BTW, the “set speed” mission item didn’t work for me, either. I used the CH6 tuning function to set the wpnav speed directly. Software was basically 3.4 rc2 plus some modifications for limited manual override in Auto (there were 8 vehicles on the course at the same time…)

The do-set-speed mission commands should work (I’ve tested them in the past). What normally confuses people is that the speed (in m/s) must be put into the 2nd column for Copter-3.3 (and higher). The Mission Planner shows speed in both the 1st and 2nd columns so people sometimes only put the speed into the first column and then it doesn’t have any effect.

It should be possible to get fairly close to the vehicle’s actual top speed but it will actually never quite reach the WPNAV_SPEED parameter value or the value set by the DO_CHANGE_SPEED command. It’s always 1m/s or so lower. It basically never tries to go over that speed and so it tends to fly slightly below it.

I’d say attach a log so we can have a look and maybe set the WPNAV_ACCEL higher so it gets to the top speed more quickly.

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Not sure about the do-set-speed thing - I did use Tower and there is basically no choice about where to enter the speed. But off course it could be a bug in Tower or the underlying framework as well.

I did also see a difference between setpoint and actual speed, but on this very gently bent course (3 spline wps per turn, radius about 130m, with long straight segments in between) the steady state error was more in the 0.3 m/s region. However, before switching to spline waypoints, I did some tests with Circle/Loiter mission items. Those tests completely failed, ven on a 300m radius the copter did not reach 8 m/s.

Thanks guys.

I was adjusting parameters in the tuning screen under the wpnav section.
I did not try specifying a speed in the actual mission commands, but will try.
And, I guess I was successful with increasing horizontal speed… I don’t have enough horizontal space in my usual spot to go very fast, but it did go about 8 meters per second when I set it to 10… and I’d bet didn’t reach 10 because there wasn’t enough distance between waypoints.

“Speed up” was giving me trouble, but I will do more testing.
(I have a mission where I fly up to the legal limit and spin around and land, taking both forward and downwards video… I’m doing it every week for a year and will do something w/ the video/pictures when it’s complete… Was hoping to get the thing to shoot up like a rocket :slight_smile: )

wpnav_accel is a good tip, too.
Thanks again

I believe there are also angle limits (and altitude control limits) you may be exceeding that are keeping you from going too fast. Like it thinks it is losing altitude so it won’t go any faster. Or to obtain your set speed the angle could be greater than the limit you have set.

Holger, you have a choice to change speed in Tower, you have to go to editor—check Wp and you have the choice to change speed, I don’t test it but is there.

@cala2 Sorry for my ambiguous wording - my comment was related on Randy’s statement about column confusions on where to enter the desired speed in Mission Planner.

I was perfectly able to add set-speed items to my mission using Tower, but I did not observe a noticeable effect from them. In contrast, my work-around using CH6 tuning for in-flight speed adjustment definitely convinced the drone to hurry up :wink:

sorry my bad english :blush:

WPNAV_ACCEL_Z has fixed it for me… Otherwise it was taking too long to reach the top speed. 15meters/second straight up was no problem. I’ll try faster tomorrow.

But there appear to be some issues when going fast, that I don’t have when going slow.
Slow up flight, 5 meters per second, all the EKF status bar graphs stay in the low green.
15 meters per second, they all go in the red at times… and Terrain was red the entire time.

It didn’t appear to cause any problems, so I haven’t really looked in to it yet. I’ll post logs if anyone wants to see them… Otherwise I’ll do more flying and report if it ever seems to cause a problem.