Autel Explorer Mission Battery Change Process

[Malli35998]

Using the Autel Explorer app on my Smart Controller, I find the Mission Battery Change Process to be very cumbersome and somewhat confusing. Attached are a series of photos I took of the screens during a single battery change.

1. Battery Warning Message, drone returns home and lands
2. Turn off the drone and swap out the battery
3. Turn drone back on
4. “Last mission not completed, continue or not?” click “Yes”. This question is not completely clear to me. Continue what? I am assuming the Mission that was not completed.
5. “Downloading the mission” – this can take quite a while
6. Eventually the “Downloading the mission” disappears. Not really obvious what to do at this point.
7. I bring the map forward and click on the blue “Fly” icon.
8. “Last mission not completed, continue or not?” click “Resume”
9. The drone takes off, flies to the beginning of the last flight line it flew and begins capturing photos again until the survey is completed or another battery change is required.

This example is a simple 32 acre survey. I will be shooting a 150 acre survey in about 10 days. It will require at least 5 batteries and 4 battery changes to complete. My BIG concern is the “Downloading the mission” process. The survey is 5x the size of the survey I shot this morning. Will this step take 5x as long to complete with the 150 acres survey?

This process needs to improved to reduce the time it takes to perform a battery change and make sure the process is clear and efficient.

I submitted a similar ticket to Autel Support as above. I also asked to see if this process has been documented. Their response, “This process unfortunately does not have any such documentation.“

 

[elistechnology]

... yup.
For that 150 acre flight i suggest to split the mission in multiple chunks each one in separate kml file. For each one the time should not be longer than ~12min (calculated by app, the drone will flying at least 18min real time depending on shape of the mission [longest front lines are more efficient, less time and battery wasted on stops when turning).
100m AGL; 70/70 overlap; 18 mph speed; single grid road corridor mapping. This settings allows me to safely map 35acre durring single flight.

 

[PhilC]

I have thought that the steps you outline above to resume a mission after returning to change batteries are as clear as can be. No, its not documented anywhere, but a quick test showed the ways the app. would prompt to resume and pick up exactly where it left off (note the "pause" icon inserted into the mission progress map when it returns due to low battery).

I did a 70 min. mission yesterday with low battery warning at 30%, 3 battery changes and not a hitch or delay of any kind..

 

[ssb73q]

Using the Autel Explorer app on my Smart Controller, I find the Mission Battery Change Process to be very cumbersome and somewhat confusing. Attached are a series of photos I took of the screens during a single battery change.

1. Battery Warning Message, drone returns home and lands
2. Turn off the drone and swap out the battery
3. Turn drone back on
4. “Last mission not completed, continue or not?” click “Yes”. This question is not completely clear to me. Continue what? I am assuming the Mission that was not completed.
5. “Downloading the mission” – this can take quite a while
6. Eventually the “Downloading the mission” disappears. Not really obvious what to do at this point.
7. I bring the map forward and click on the blue “Fly” icon.
8. “Last mission not completed, continue or not?” click “Resume”
9. The drone takes off, flies to the beginning of the last flight line it flew and begins capturing photos again until the survey is completed or another battery change is required.

This example is a simple 32 acre survey. I will be shooting a 150 acre survey in about 10 days. It will require at least 5 batteries and 4 battery changes to complete. My BIG concern is the “Downloading the mission” process. The survey is 5x the size of the survey I shot this morning. Will this step take 5x as long to complete with the 150 acres survey?

This process needs to improved to reduce the time it takes to perform a battery change and make sure the process is clear and efficient.

I submitted a similar ticket to Autel Support as above. I also asked to see if this process has been documented. Their response, “This process unfortunately does not have any such documentation.“

Hi Malli,

When doing missions I don't wait until the Battery Warning, but do a return to home when the battery is obviously not going to finish the mission. Then I swap batteries and click Continue Mission. When the mission is completed I use the open source (free) Windows Native WebODM to process and stitch the images.

Regards,
Richard

 

[goldenu2]

Using the Autel Explorer app on my Smart Controller, I find the Mission Battery Change Process to be very cumbersome and somewhat confusing. Attached are a series of photos I took of the screens during a single battery change.

1. Battery Warning Message, drone returns home and lands
2. Turn off the drone and swap out the battery
3. Turn drone back on
4. “Last mission not completed, continue or not?” click “Yes”. This question is not completely clear to me. Continue what? I am assuming the Mission that was not completed.
5. “Downloading the mission” – this can take quite a while
6. Eventually the “Downloading the mission” disappears. Not really obvious what to do at this point.
7. I bring the map forward and click on the blue “Fly” icon.
8. “Last mission not completed, continue or not?” click “Resume”
9. The drone takes off, flies to the beginning of the last flight line it flew and begins capturing photos again until the survey is completed or another battery change is required.

This example is a simple 32 acre survey. I will be shooting a 150 acre survey in about 10 days. It will require at least 5 batteries and 4 battery changes to complete. My BIG concern is the “Downloading the mission” process. The survey is 5x the size of the survey I shot this morning. Will this step take 5x as long to complete with the 150 acres survey?

This process needs to improved to reduce the time it takes to perform a battery change and make sure the process is clear and efficient.

I submitted a similar ticket to Autel Support as above. I also asked to see if this process has been documented. Their response, “This process unfortunately does not have any such documentation.“

You're doing better than I am: I have a case in with Autel right now as my SC crashes when trying to download the mission after a battery change. About once in every 4 attempts it will actually succeed, the other 3 times I end up having to restart both the aircraft and the SC to continue. If you try my method at any point, make sure to wait until the aircraft is fully ready before telling it to continue. I generally wait until everything looks ready and then wait 30 more seconds. I feel and share your frustration.

 

[goldenu2]

Using the Autel Explorer app on my Smart Controller, I find the Mission Battery Change Process to be very cumbersome and somewhat confusing. Attached are a series of photos I took of the screens during a single battery change.

1. Battery Warning Message, drone returns home and lands
2. Turn off the drone and swap out the battery
3. Turn drone back on
4. “Last mission not completed, continue or not?” click “Yes”. This question is not completely clear to me. Continue what? I am assuming the Mission that was not completed.
5. “Downloading the mission” – this can take quite a while
6. Eventually the “Downloading the mission” disappears. Not really obvious what to do at this point.
7. I bring the map forward and click on the blue “Fly” icon.
8. “Last mission not completed, continue or not?” click “Resume”
9. The drone takes off, flies to the beginning of the last flight line it flew and begins capturing photos again until the survey is completed or another battery change is required.

This example is a simple 32 acre survey. I will be shooting a 150 acre survey in about 10 days. It will require at least 5 batteries and 4 battery changes to complete. My BIG concern is the “Downloading the mission” process. The survey is 5x the size of the survey I shot this morning. Will this step take 5x as long to complete with the 150 acres survey?

This process needs to improved to reduce the time it takes to perform a battery change and make sure the process is clear and efficient.

I submitted a similar ticket to Autel Support as above. I also asked to see if this process has been documented. Their response, “This process unfortunately does not have any such documentation.“

If yours is continuing the mission at all, be grateful: mine either never downloads the map, or just outright crashes the app. Meanwhile Autel support has been sitting on the ticket for weeks and can't even bother to communicate.

 

[Malli35998]

Yes, but the larger the mission, the longer it takes to upload the mission plan waypoints.

 

[goldenu2]

You're doing better than I am: I have a case in with Autel right now as my SC crashes when trying to download the mission after a battery change. About once in every 4 attempts it will actually succeed, the other 3 times I end up having to restart both the aircraft and the SC to continue. If you try my method at any point, make sure to wait until the aircraft is fully ready before telling it to continue. I generally wait until everything looks ready and then wait 30 more seconds. I feel and share your frustration.

This is my experience as well, and my regular 100-300 acre missions are rapidly making me hate this drone. The latest firmware update not only did not fix this, it made it worse. Add to that the absolutely nonexistent support from Autel, and I think this might be the worst purchase I've ever made for my company.

 

[Malli35998]

This is my experience as well, and my regular 100-300 acre missions are rapidly making me hate this drone. The latest firmware update not only did not fix this, it made it worse. Add to that the absolutely nonexistent support from Autel, and I think this might be the worst purchase I've ever made for my company.

Attached is a nearly 200 acre survey I shot using the Evo 2 Enterprise Pro 6K drone. I use my GIS application (Global Mapper) to design my surveys. I place 1500' VLOS rings (red circles) around each HP. You could probably push this to 2000' VLOS rings for the Enterprise drone. In this case I created 3 HPs to shoot the entire survey. This helps to mitigate the poor way Autel handles battery changes. I superimposed the actual flight lines as reference. The survey was shot at 250' AGL.