Low speed mode (EASA regulations July 2020)

ArduCopter Copter 4.0
1

I am sure this has been discussed before but I can’t find such a discussion.

The forthcoming EASA regulations coming into force in July 2020 are beginning to put in place the ability to legally “A2- fly close to people” with UAS <4kg. (but no self built unless you are in the specific category)

All new drones will begin to be marked with categories C0,C1,C2… etc which will enable the user to understand what they can and can’t do with them.

Self built UAS are still allowed up to 25kg but only in A3 operations (far from people).

It would be good to start building in functionality to enable A2 operations for the specific category with self built aircraft.

With that in mind It would be really useful to have a dedicated low speed mode. This would-be able to switch in and out of a “low speed” mode with clear indications in mission planner that the mode is active.

Many ways of doing this but would a new flight mode make sense? “Loiter-Slow”. It would use all the same parameters as loiter except you would be able to adjust horizontal and vertical speed limit parameters. Possibly change RC feel to make the aircraft a bit more docile?

We have been manually doing this by changing parameters for loiter. However, some mission profiles require a high speed transit and then a low speed loiter in proximity to an object.

What are other peoples thoughts on this? Might already be a solution I am overlooking.

2

hello

We need to wait official text of application before any move as for now slow-speed means nothing ? is 10m/s slow ?1m/s ? 2 m/s ? we don’t know. As for all regulation, way and see…
Moreover, will already have way to reduce speed. So I don’t think we need to duplicate a mode only to change speed that something heavy for pretty no gain. Operators would be in charge to set their parameter correctly as always !

3

This would probably be a better accomplished through the “parameter banks”
thing that tridge has mumbled about a couple of times now.

Poor-man’s solution would be input shaping on the transmitter itself -
assuming manual flight.

4

You can do this via scripting, change the angle and speed limits params depending on a RC input position

5

To push the thread back from the past … the regulations are coming closer.

The above mentioned “COMMISSION DELEGATED REGULATION (EU) 2019/945” defines the required “low speed mode” for class C2 precisely as a maximum 3m/s.
This will be the requirement to ability to legally fly close to people in class A2 with UAS <4kg. Just like @tegwin described that above. This will be essential for many drone builders in EU.

So, is it possible to create some kind of special Loiter mode (or something else), that limits the maximum horizontal speed to 3m/s?
@iampete I look at the scripting docs, but I did not find a function to change parameters. Can you please give me some litte hint?

Thanks,
Stefan

6

This is the parameter example:

Note that it will only work on 4.1.dev

7

Thank you, I’ll take a look at it.

8

Hi,

Do you have some news about the low-speed mode for EASA compliance ?

Is there another way to do it without lua script ?

9

Thanks for your Support.
Is there another possibility
via parameters e.g. the Loiter flight mode
to 3m/s via parameters?

10

You can use Lua to switch between low and high speed mode by changing appropriate parameters, all needed functions are covered by the examples.

11

which parameters have to be adjusted to activate the slow mode