Drone Returns to Home Too Soon

I have had this issue for a couple of months now and I am not quite certain what causes it to happen or why it happens. When I begin a mission, the drone takes off and flies to the first waypoint, as is intended, and will continue the mission as normal until it reaches the 16th waypoint or so. The drone will abruptly end the mission and initiate the return to home. After replacing the battery, which is unnecessary most of the time, or keeping the same battery in the drone, it will repeat this behavior after every takeoff. I have only had one instance where the drone flew past this approximate waypoint limit, but that didn't occur until after switching to my fourth battery.

Grant Garcia 17 de julio de 2025 21:00

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If you are using Terrain Awareness and you are in rough terrain it could be chewing through the 100 waypoint limit really quickly.

Or you could have a flight timer set in the app.

But... after looking at your flight logs I can see the issue is actually that you are using the STI (Stop To Image) setting which uses a waypoint for every imaging location. Since the aircraft can only be programmed with 100 images it is going out and doing roughly 100 images at a time.

Unless you have a specific need to be using this setting you shouldn't need to be using it. It comes in handy when you need zero smear in your images but that is for some very specific cases that are not likely what you are trying to accomplish. Just turn that setting off and you will keep flying much faster.

Zane 17 de julio de 2025 23:52

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I have always avoided using the Terrain Awareness feature because the relative terrain of the areas I work in are mostly flat.

In all of my missions, I keep the flight time roughly around 20 minutes. Through trial and error, 20 minutes is approximately the most amount of time I can get out of a single battery.

I do in fact use STI and that is because I am using a Mavic 2 Pro and want to avoid the smearing that can be caused by the shutter. I never had any problems using STI before with the M2P.

My issue is stemming from my missions arbitrarily deciding when to use less waypoints than more. For example, when the drone approximately hits the 16th waypoint, I am sitting at roughly 80% of a charged battery.

Grant Garcia 18 de julio de 2025 02:01 0 votos

The thing with STI is that it takes one waypoint per image since it is stopping. The aircraft can only take 100 waypoints at a time. This is why it is coming back early.

A small amount of smear is OK until it starts to exceed 2 times the GSD. So if you are flying 1 inch per pixel you don't want your smear to exceed 2 inches. But with reasonably short exposure times it doesn't get anywhere near that at the speeds the aircraft can fly.

It is not arbitrarily coming back early. It is coming back at the exact same number of images every time.

Zane 18 de julio de 2025 22:14 0 votos