New Robot: Preflight check

Credit: Steven Chen, Guilherme Nardari, Vaibhav Arcot

Follow These Steps Before Every Flight

These are lessons learned from crashes

Golden Rules

1. Everyone should always stay behind and keep a safe distance (>3m) from the safety pilot, to leave space for emergency take-over and avoid collision with the safety pilot.
2. No person / car except for the safety pilot should be directly below the UAV.

Roles

1. (Safety Pilot) Familiarize yourself with how to take over, land, and disarm the drone.
2. (Computer Pilot) (Automated) Familiarize yourself with the software commands and GUI (Manual) Monitor QGC for Warnings
3. (Scout/Videographer) Optional Take videos, follow drone, shout out strange behaviors

Preflight Check

1. Check loose cabling. These can catch in the propellers and make the drone crash.
2. Check that wires are tightly plugged in and hot-glued into ESC. These can fall out during flight and make the drone crash.
3. Check the battery levels/balance. Getting too low can cause the Pixhawk to restart and make the drone crash. Battery cell should always be above 3.4V.
4. Check that the battery monitor will beep a warning when battery levels get below threshold. The battery level getting too low during a flight will make the Pixhawk restart and the drone crash.
5. Perform a manual flight. This is important every time you start a new flight to make sure the trims on the RC are correct, there is nothing loose on the drone, the drone is behaving normally, the safety pilot can anticipate drone behavior.
6. Reboot the Pixhawk before every automated flight. Not rebooting the Pixhawk will mess up state estimates and cause the drone to crash.

Flight Commands

Check that everyone is ready Follow these commands every time before an automated flight (inspired by rock climbing). The purpose is to ensure everyone involved in the drone flight is ready

1. Safety Pilot: get familiar with manually piloting the UAV in stabilized mode (attitude control mode). Make sure you know what throttle is needed for hovering the UAV (we will refer to this as Hover Throttle in the following instructions)
2. Computer Operator: Check odometry and map are both available, turn off map visualization to avoid communication drop. Talk to safety pilot: Autonomy Ready!
3. Safety Pilot: Disable kill switch, flip the mode into autonomous. Talk to the computer operator: Motors On!
4. Computer Operator: click motors on. Talk to safety pilot: Motors On Confirmed!
5. Safety Pilot: Now propellers should start spinning slowly, if yes, flip the arm switch to arm, push the throttle to the Hover Throttle position to prepare for taking over (propellers should be spinning at the same speed). Talk to computer opeator: Take off!
6. Computer Operator: Click takeoff. Talk to the safety pilot: takeoff confirmed!
7. Computer Operator: wait for takeoff to complete. After that, click / load waypoints, Publish Waypoints, and click Execute Mission. Talk to the pilot: Executing Mission!
8. Computer Operator: if the mission is done, click Land Here.
9. Safety Pilot: watch the UAV closely and be prepared to take over. If anything does not work as described, switch back to manual mode, land the UAV, and enable the kill switch to debug.