I was wondering if there could be a way to get a mission summary when creating missions in MP. After all, MP does know about all parameters of your quad/copter/plane, such as max vertical speed, max horizontal speed, etc. The idea of the mission summary would be for MP to show :
[ul]
[li] total distance (horizontal)[/li]
[li] total distance (vertical)[/li]
[li] estimated mission duration (minutes, seconds)[/li][/ul]
The last item in particular would be very helpful for multicopters, as one could easily gauge if the created mission might get into the flight time limit of the machine (depending on lipo size, total weight and… your flying experience).
Or is this all already available but I haven’t found it yet ?
Cool idea! Now somebody just needs to write a physics engine which additionally pulls the weather forecast and takes wind, air pressure and temperature into account. Of course, the user would also need to know the drag coefficient of the vehicle, the prop data and the battery performance change parameters over a temperature range of the specific battery in use. Sounds fairly easy…
Are you volunteering to write it?
I don’t have the programming skills to do this
But without going to the extreme of including a physics engine etc, it would be very useful to get a minimum mission time estimation, even a rough assumption taking the horizontal, vertical speeds etc which are set as parameters to arducopter.
I discussed this with a few people starting to seriously look at the pixhawk for large hexa or octocopters carrying expensive cameras - they see a lot of interest in the mission planning for shooting various scenes, and the discussion turned up they would badly need as well to estimate the minimum flight time of a mission. No one wants to see a RED camera or a Canon 5D Mark II fall as a rock from the sky.
Yeah, but that’s my point… The power consumption varies massively depending on payload, wind, flying style, etc. Especially when talking about this values, it’s impossible to make a sensible prediction. The only thing that you can basically do is collect your own experience on how much power your vehicles will consume in which style and use pen and paper. AND set the battery failsafe to a very conservative setting.
There are no so much variations in flying style when you execute an automated mission with a multicopter, unless you have a lot of mixes of waypoints with long hoover time and other with no standby.
When it comes to payload, this is when you can switch to other tools like eCalc (which I do) to evaluate depending on total weight, size of lipo etc what would be my expected theoretical flying time. MP does not need to do it all.
