Possible flyaway while trying figure 8 (havent used any aprilatags for postion localisation)

mohammednaveed

Hello everyone
I have a VOXL Flight Deck on a 250 size quadcopter. I am using the stock firmware that came with the board and haven't made any changes to any PIDs as well. I have tested the drone in stabilized mode, altitude mode, position mode, auto mode and RTL. In short just like a basic drone!

However two days ago I went ahead and setup the flight deck for VIO and followed the recommended documentation. I was able to flick to position mode and fly the drone using VIO
while GPS was off. The drone was stable and maintained constant altitude while is was flying it.

The next thing I wanted to try out was doing the figure 8 pattern. So I setup a switch for offboard mode. I took off in position mode (VIO) did a little move around just to confirm VIO was working one last time before doing the figure 8 pattern.

Happy that VIO is still working, I took off again in position mode to like a 1m or 2m altitude and flicked to offboard mode immediately. The drone instead of flying forward it immediately just pitched itself backwards and crashed into a wall all in the blink of an eye. I am under the assumption that the figure 8 pattern requires no codes to be written and is preloaded into the VOXL and on flicking to offboard mode it will always do figure 8.

Could someone please guide me to what I did wrong and also the entire camera suite is not working now after the crash and i just get error message from the camera server. I have attached two Ulogs for your analysis.

Log 15 is just to confirm VIO is working before i switch to offboard mode.
Log 16 is the offboard mode flight.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1q1oGoDLbrGlbcHAfJVdV98JGiCutCoT8?usp=sharing

The test area is a huge open indoor atrium (almost the size of a tennis court) and ceiling is 3 floors high. The floor of the atrium is grayish marble and kinda reflective in nature ( I haven't put any tapes on the floor prior the test) . The atrium is lit by natural light coming through the huge window wall.

Your help and guidance is truly appreciated.

Thanks & Regards
Mohammed Naveed

James Strawson

Hi Mohammed,

The current stable release of voxl-vision-px4 does the figure-8 centered wherever the VIO coordinate frame is located. This is usually wherever the unit was powered up, but VIO can drift over time.

The development branch of voxl-vision-px4 will by default start the figure-8 centered wherever it currently is with an option to go back to the old behavior. I can help you get this new branch up and running if you like.

It is likely the camera connectors jostled loose in the crash. Try popping all 3 camera connectors off of the voxl pcb and reseating them with the system powered off.

Best,
James

mohammednaveed

Hi James,
Thank you for your help!
I am yet to inspect the VOXL flight deck for the connectors.
I would like to test out the new branch.

Thanks and regards,
Mohammed Naveed