View of the Isle Wight from a quadcopter

[gjgm]

I thought the whole point of these things, and what makes them "drones" rather than "model helicopters", is that they are to some extent autonomous? Ie, you say "fly to this point" and they work out the actual control inputs needed to do it.

We had a demo at work where one of our marketing guys was controlling a drone by writing a script for it in advance. The actual language was JavaScript, but conceptually the steps were things like:
Take off
Fly one metre left
Climb two metres higher
Go three metres back
Land.

Not piloting as such at all.

Pete

I suppose it depends on what you want to do with it. You can do some stunts with quads, and someone has apparently written code where it will recover from inverted flight on its own. I don't think there is an interpretation that a drone/quad means it is pre-programmed..most I believe are flown FPV or just visually.
But a £35 flight board from China and free code enables you to use the GPS (if fitted) and then pre-programme waypoints, yes, if that is your thing. In fact what makes them more approachable as a hobby to many is that with barometric sensors an gyro sensors, the thing will hold position (or correct to a hold position) and not plummet to earth while you madly panic ! Also now, as on the DJI boards (and others) is the model will take its "bearing" from take off point and so ensure that forward is forward to you, which ever way the quad faces. That is going to take out alot of the orientation issues. Add in auto back to base etc... well, you can start to programme whatever you wish using the open code, I guess.
I think most people want to fly them though, so you can react to the scenario. I suppose there must be instances to programme is preferable, but you must need the circumstances to be stable ?

 

[U4]

totally agree, but don't call me Shirley

Haha, brilliant!