This is the first obstacle avoidance/RTH test with my new drone, "Hope". I hope she performs as well as her predecessor, "Faith". Music is: Beyond the Western Horizon by Howard Harper-Barnes and Yakety Sax by Boots Randolph
That was sick!! The Mini 4 Pro's obstacle avoidance is absolutely next-level stuff. I was testing the ActiveTrack on my bike in my neighborhood filled with houses, wires, and trees. At one point, I made a right turn and the drone turned wide, headed straight for a tree and quickly picked its way through the leaves and branches on a downward angle, came right out on the other side and kept me in sight without dropping a stitch. I swear I thought it was gonna crash about a half dozen times but it saved itself every time.
I have looked at discussions of there being a bug in the programming algorithm when mixing active tracking and obstacle avoidance. The bug being that the active track algorithm overrides the obstacle avoidance when the drone is doing an active track maneuver (particularly a sweeping upward maneuver) and encounters an obstacle overhead. A couple of guys have done videos demonstrating it. Apparently, even though the cameras can see the obstacle, the active track maneuvering algorithm overrides the avoidance algorithm.
@@dgibbsfl I don't know, my M4P has gotten into some very tight spaces while on active track and found its way out, which totally amazed me. Here's my first experience with it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-17hCpPzvzgs.html
I'd love to see one of these RTH videos done with the FPV mode turned on so we can get the feeling of how the drone banks and contorts itself to get through the trees. Maybe I'll do that myself when I do my first RTH test.
Yeah, it works best if you have a lot of tree cover so it can't see the sky, and it stays down low. I noticed it tries to follow the same route back home, so the more zigzagged, the better. Good luck!
Good video. How did you get the crosshair on the controller screen? Or is that now standard with a recent update? BTW: the sudden loudness of the Yakety Sax track nearly knocked me out of my chair!
Hahaha, thanks, didn't mean to scare you. To get the crosshairs on the screen, in the drone camera view mode, tap the 3 dots at the upper right, then tap on the camera tab, then go down to "Gridlines", and the far right, with the rectangle with the dot in the center, is the crosshairs. That way, you know exactly where the drone is headed. Works well for aiming between 2 objects to fly between. It also works great for finding the exact height of objects, like a tree, building, tower, etc, but only if you have the gimbal centered on 0°.
@@engineer1178 Yes, this changed in the latest RC2 Controller firmware and upgrade to DJI Fly 1.13.0. The N was changed to P by mistake. The next update should fix that.
@@gama45 I was aware of the optimum RTH setting but had no idea you could bury the aircraft in the woods like that and then press the RTH button and the craft pick it's way, crawling and crabbing, out of a situation like that toward the home point. It makes you wonder two things: 1. What would the drone do if it encountered a "no way out" situation? 2. Why would an operator want to do that sort of thing? I will say again that it was impressive to watch, I never would have dreamed the technology was at that advanced of a level while at the same time I never would have imagined getting in to that kind of situation otherwise. It was interesting.
@@dgibbsfl At first, I just wanted to see if it could find its way home. Then I was testing the limits to see if it could get out of some of these situations. I found that if there isn't a clear path to the sky, it will try to follow the same route back. Yes, the technology is amazing! And besides that, it's fun to watch as it follows that zigzag green path through the woods.
@@gama45 It's definitely fun to watch. It sort of boggles my mind that if it can't discern a clear path to the open sky that it remembers and will backtrack over the path that it came in on. The technology is almost spooky good if that's the case. I have mixed emotions with the obstacle avoidance aspect. I lost a Mini 3 Pro while making a newbie mistake that partly involved the obstacle avoidance system by not understanding the screen instrumentation correctly. It forced me more to the conservative side even when replacing the M3P with the more advanced M4P. At the same time I have a strong desire to lean more into the obstacle avoidance safety net when going for some of the photographic angles that are possible. Your little experiment really opened my eyes and makes me want to push the envelope a little more, maybe a lot more.
