I am looking at putting PX4 on a flyer my wing and am trying to determine if it supports auto land like other softwares such as on sensefly wings. If at any time I hit RTL will the plane come back and circle overhead to ensure wind direction is correct then land in the direction of the wind based on glide slope?
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It does support RTL and auto-land. We’re not doing wind-direction landings yet, although we do estimate the wind direction and could easily add that.
Thanks for the information. I’ll hold off switching until that feature is ready for testing. To be able to put a plane in the air in any mode and be able to flip a switch to RTL and Autoland if something goes bad is powerful.
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Thanks for the pointers. We certainly will look into this: https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/issues/4099
I think it is a good idea to implement this spirals for gaining altitude and descending in RTL procedure.
Last week we’ve had a case where the plane was way too high in the RTL procedure and we by mistake did not change the default RTL loiter alt so it was 40 meters. The difference in the alt was about 150 meters so the plane just dived with max pith down angle ~45 degrees and it picked such a speed that it became scary for the spectators :). I told them it will recover, everybody was speechless but once 40m were reached it recovered in loiter.
The same is true in reverse cases. We set RTL to 100m. So if we fly at 40 - 50 meters height and we hit RTL, the plane just plunges with full throttle at ~45 degrees pitch up. It will be better and safer in my opinion if after some delta difference between your current height and the RTL preset height to decide to climb it with spiral or climb it directly. In terms of safety and confined spaces with obstacles probably the spiral is better too. Or it might be a parameter that can be preset for the strategy we want to use.
During this spirals you can detect wind etc.