Flying in Woodland

SMOk3 · Jul 13, 2019

There's this local woodland I want to fly through, but I'm a little nervous in doing so. The drone will be in "LOS", but what will happen if it comes up with a poor signal
and decides to "RTH"? Can I cancel the "RTH" and take over manually and continue with my flight?

tia

Lizio · Jul 13, 2019

Yes. See you page 25 of this :- https://www.parrot.com/files/s3fs-public/firmware/anafi_user_guide_v2.4.pdf

Rocky the FS · Jul 14, 2019

I would also want to be walking along with the drone, not much more than 50 feet behind, depending on the density of the trunks and branches. A nice slow speed will probably look better anyway.

SMOk3 · Jul 14, 2019

Rocky the FS said:
I would also want to be walking along with the drone,

Yeah that was my intention seeing as it's going to be my first time flying in the woodland.

Landbo · Jul 14, 2019

SMOk3 said:
There's this local woodland I want to fly through, but I'm a little nervous in doing so. The drone will be in "LOS", but what will happen if it comes up with a poor signal
and decides to "RTH"? Can I cancel the "RTH" and take over manually and continue with my flight?

tia

1. If Anafi does not receive a radio signal from the controller, she just flies back to the place you started from and hover 2 meters above the ground until you reconnect to the controller and land or land automatically when there is no more battery power.

2. If Anafi is connected to the controller you can at any time stop an RTH by pressing the "Cancel RTH" field on your screen or pressing the RTH button for 2 seconds on the controller or just use a stick.

I strongly recommend you to do some test flights where you test the different scenarios under controlled conditions out over an open field without things you can fly into. Better to be safe than cry over a crached Anafi.

Regards, Leif.

Kilrah · Jul 14, 2019

SMOk3 said:
The drone will be in "LOS", but what will happen if it comes up with a poor signal
and decides to "RTH"? Can I cancel the "RTH" and take over manually and continue with my flight?

If it triggers RTH becasue you lost RC signal you obviously cannot cancel the RTH as there's no way to send that command to the aircraft...

Other aircraft have a setting for the behavior to have on signal loss for scenarios like this one and disabling RTH, but unfortunately it's not the case on the anafi.

Rocky the FS · Jul 14, 2019

Kilrah said:
If it triggers RTH becasue you lost RC signal you obviously cannot cancel the RTH as there's no way to send that command to the aircraft...

This is precisely the reason it is so important to stay close and not let the drone get behind anything, including a large tree trunk, to cause LOS in a crowded environment. I think the lowest settable altitude for RTH is 20 feet, clearly not low enough for a forest, but I would test this in an open environment.

Jagerbomb52 · Jul 14, 2019

Last summer I tried using the Anafi while I was walking down a narrow trail to a small water falls. (2KM)
I found just having it 20 or so feet in front of me was hard to adjust for upcoming corners and low branches. I ended up using my small action camera for the walk in and then the Anafi for the small water falls. Even then I had to be careful of the tree canopy over the small creek and falls.

SMOk3 · Jul 14, 2019

Thanks everyone for the information and ideas. I think I'll certainly practice first before taking the plunge.

Rocky the FS · Jul 14, 2019

Yeah, I spent a lot of time with the beginner drone learning precision control....since there was 6 feet of snow outside and I had to fly it indoors. For the Anafi I set up imaginary obstacle courses and flew them many many times, until I could walk the Anafi like it was a dog on a leash, three feet up, around my property which has numerous trees and shrubs. The slowest speed I could achieve without constant starting and stopping was around 3 feet per second. The sticks are very sensitive, but they have a threshold, which makes slow precision maneuvering quite a skill.

Setting all the film flight parameters to very low levels helped a lot with slow flight.