This is what it’s all about! Waypoint missions were the main reason the quest for autonomous flight was started. It’s what will allow me to collect data for a project in the works without me having to fly it manually the entire time.
On 15th February I set out with my dad to our usual flying location to finally get it over with. I had tried to get waypoint missions to work twice before on 5th and 8th February, but was unsuccessful due to incorrect settings and other issues.
Upon reaching the ground, I made the waypoint mission on QGroundControl running on my phone and uploaded it to the plane before autolaunching it. It looked something like this:
Then all that was left to do was launch it! The full flight can be seen in my Instagram post below which also shows an accurate animated version of the flight path at the top since the plane was pretty difficult to see in the video (it flew pretty far away).
Success! The plane autonomously flew from and to all the waypoints it was given from my phone before returning to the launch point and circling over us. Since the waypoint mission was quite short, I flew the plane manually afterwards as a victory lap and ended up pulling a REALLY sketchy loop. Now that I look back on it, I should’ve learned from it. Is this perhaps a hint to something catastrophic which happened a month later? Hmmmm……………..
And that concludes the second step in perfecting autonomous flight! Now all that’s left are autonomous landings, which will be covered in my next post. I’m hoping to get these out quickly since all these flights have already been concluded and I want to get my website blog caught up with what’s going on in my Instagram updates, since those are the latest. Thanks for reading!