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Multi-Battery missions

Bobstaff

Active Member
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Oct 31, 2020
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Lowbanks, ON
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www.lighthouseaerialimaging.com
I planned out a rectangular mission that, as I was finishing setting it up, I noticed that the flight was going to be about 3 minutes longer than one battery would fly. I didn't want to increase my altitude any further to shorten the flight. I have heard that this is one of the few drones that will continue the mission on it's own after a battery change, so I figured "ok let's try it".
Sure enough, when the low battery warning came on, with about 5 minutes left in the mission, it came home, landed, I swapped batteries and the app asked if I wanted to continue the mission? I said YES, it reloaded the mission, took off, and finished it's job, came back home and landed. I was pretty impressed !
One note. It didn't return the location of the battery warning, and where the last picture was taken, it went to the beginning of that leg on the mission (last waypoint) and started from there.
Just thought I'd throw that out there.
 
It is a pretty impressive feature. It's been awhile since I had to make use of it but I believe that on a rectangular mission that I ran, it did return right back to where it left off and continued on. Haven't had a need yet to do a waypoint mission to try but thanks for the heads up on how it would behave.
 
Yes, the battery switching works very well in mapping missions. I used it a lot this summer in mapping multiple 2-3 km2 areas (3-4 battery switches for the biggest areas). A few things to remember:

1. Make sure all your batteries have the same firmware!! I had one battery out of sync with my others and this caused chaos in the switch over. I was getting strange update messages but nothing was happening and when I took off again the EVO went sort erratic and almost crashed. I had to cancel the mission and land. I then took my best guess at where to continue from after defining a new mission.
2. Be conservative on your battery warning for big areas. I leave mine at 20% to get me back home if RTH is way out there. I had one episode where the critical battery level was hit and the EVO went into auto-land mode in the middle of a very nasty area. Very scary. I was just able to grab my EVO out of the sky before the battery hit zero. Save your batteries by landing at 15-20%.
3. The continue mission always starts at the beginning of a flight line no matter how far down it you where when RTH was initiated. So if getting low on a battery make sure you make the turn onto the flight line you want to return to. It is best to let it take one photo to make sure it will go back to this path. A few times I turned onto a path, then initiated RTH, but after the battery switch it went to the previous flight line!! When flight lines are 1 km long this is bad. So make sure the first photo is taken at the beginning of a line before RTH.

To bad this good battery switching feature and mapping potential is being compromised by beta mission planning software that is full of holes. Big holes. The most important being:

1. EVO stops dead at every waypoint! So the transition from one flight line to another is brutal to watch. Lots of times is wasted at the drone stops at the end of a flight line, thinks for a while, then turns towards the next flight line, inches forward, stops, then aligns itself with the new flight line and then starts mapping again. It's a total killer. HUGE time is wasted in each mission in these transitions. The drone should just do a fast curved turn and keep going. I and others have been ranting about this for a while. Response from Autel - NADA. NADA. NADA. NADA. IMHO this missing feature relegates this drone to toy status. If you were into cinematography this would be a deal breaker.
2. Use Ardu Mission Planner to determine the correct height to fly a mission at. The calculate pixel res is off by more than 1.5x, which means that the actual sidelap and forward overlap will probably be different then what you defined.
3. Cannot shoot raw. I think this is because the write times are really, really slow. I'm *guessing* this is software again as the sensor used in the EVO is used in a high end compact camera.
4. Flight speed is limited to 10 m/s. Why? I was flying missions at 180m this summer and would have like to increase that to 15 m/s.

I'm going to keep complaining and screaming at Autel this winter to get these issues addressed. If these issues are not addressed then I'll be selling my EVO 2 Pro, which would be a bummer since it really does have great potential (mapping). But their SILENCE is becoming pretty telling.
 
The stopping at way points is only on grid patterns though isn't it? In way point flying you have the option to fly through the way point, or stop. That was just from what I read.
Also I will say that I like the way the Evo handles transitioning to the next row. Stop, turn, move over and start again without taking pictures. My Mavic 2 ED keeps taking pictures AS its turning, and during the travel to the next row. I spend a considerable amount of time deleting those pictures after downloading them. I also noticed that it will also resume a mission after swapping batteries. I just happened to stumble on that.
Overall I'm quite happy with this thing so far. But I agree, it could use some some updates....like being able to adjust exposure first.
 
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Yes, the battery switching works very well in mapping missions. I used it a lot this summer in mapping multiple 2-3 km2 areas (3-4 battery switches for the biggest areas). A few things to remember:

1. Make sure all your batteries have the same firmware!! I had one battery out of sync with my others and this caused chaos in the switch over. I was getting strange update messages but nothing was happening and when I took off again the EVO went sort erratic and almost crashed. I had to cancel the mission and land. I then took my best guess at where to continue from after defining a new mission.
2. Be conservative on your battery warning for big areas. I leave mine at 20% to get me back home if RTH is way out there. I had one episode where the critical battery level was hit and the EVO went into auto-land mode in the middle of a very nasty area. Very scary. I was just able to grab my EVO out of the sky before the battery hit zero. Save your batteries by landing at 15-20%.
3. The continue mission always starts at the beginning of a flight line no matter how far down it you where when RTH was initiated. So if getting low on a battery make sure you make the turn onto the flight line you want to return to. It is best to let it take one photo to make sure it will go back to this path. A few times I turned onto a path, then initiated RTH, but after the battery switch it went to the previous flight line!! When flight lines are 1 km long this is bad. So make sure the first photo is taken at the beginning of a line before RTH.

To bad this good battery switching feature and mapping potential is being compromised by beta mission planning software that is full of holes. Big holes. The most important being:

1. EVO stops dead at every waypoint! So the transition from one flight line to another is brutal to watch. Lots of times is wasted at the drone stops at the end of a flight line, thinks for a while, then turns towards the next flight line, inches forward, stops, then aligns itself with the new flight line and then starts mapping again. It's a total killer. HUGE time is wasted in each mission in these transitions. The drone should just do a fast curved turn and keep going. I and others have been ranting about this for a while. Response from Autel - NADA. NADA. NADA. NADA. IMHO this missing feature relegates this drone to toy status. If you were into cinematography this would be a deal breaker.
2. Use Ardu Mission Planner to determine the correct height to fly a mission at. The calculate pixel res is off by more than 1.5x, which means that the actual sidelap and forward overlap will probably be different then what you defined.
3. Cannot shoot raw. I think this is because the write times are really, really slow. I'm *guessing* this is software again as the sensor used in the EVO is used in a high end compact camera.
4. Flight speed is limited to 10 m/s. Why? I was flying missions at 180m this summer and would have like to increase that to 15 m/s.

I'm going to keep complaining and screaming at Autel this winter to get these issues addressed. If these issues are not addressed then I'll be selling my EVO 2 Pro, which would be a bummer since it really does have great potential (mapping). But their SILENCE is becoming pretty telling.
Thanks for the excellent post. I am just beginning to provide services for my construction clients and decided on the Evo over DJI. Had it for about 2 weeks and am impressed so far.
 

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