Flight

Calibration and Taking Off!

  1. Calibration
  2. First Flight!
  3. Future Development

Calibration

After the drone is assembled and configured, the next step is to calibrate all the components. This step is essential as the FCU learns about the ranges and limits of the drone’s functionality. Fortunately, the process is well documented and easy to follow.

  1. Radio
  2. Accelerometer
  3. Compass
  4. ESC
  5. Motors
  6. Failsafe

After setting up the aforementioned systems, we can now begin teaching the FCU how to control the drone. But first you need to ensure Telemetry data is being communicated between your ground station and the drone.

After completing calibration, save a copy of your Parameter Tree so that you don’t need to redo the entire process if you ever need to restart.

First Flight!

Switch the flight mode to Stabilize, run your pre-flight checklist and only when it is safe should you arm your motors! Before flying more confidently, we suggest doing some basic tests to check whether the drone will behave as expected:

  1. Gently increase the throttle so that the drone is barely touching the ground.
  2. Slowly adjust the pitch.
  3. Carefully observe whether the drone responds appropriately.
  4. If it passes, repeat the same process with roll and yaw.
  5. If it fails, check the motor numbering, the spin of the motors and of the propellers

After you have confirmed these, you can try to make the drone lift off the ground and into the air. Remain cautious since it has not yet been tuned and may react too quickly or too slowly to your commands.

This can be changed by adjusting the Pitch/Roll sensitivity found in Basic Tuning.

Future Development

The Navio2 offers excellent features for developing autonomous applications. MissionPlanner can help with the basic autonomous behavior like setting a home point to return to, automated take-off and landing, as well as flight paths that the drone can follow. If you want to get more hands on, the Navio2 is set up with the Robot Operating System (ROS) and can integrate with DroneKit so you can program the drone to do some cool custom actions. Some examples are controlling the drone through gestures, movements or even brain waves.

Issues? Fly back to Troubleshooting