Russian Postal Drone: Not a good start

Steve Carr · Apr 6, 2018

DrNewcenstein · Apr 6, 2018

Yeah, seems like there were high winds, which they should've known better. Then again, I'm sure those in charge were committed to the presentation as scheduled, and relied on the pilot to "deal with it".

gwhuntoon · Apr 6, 2018

Steve, I'm glad you posted this I saw it and just wanted to add the comment of just how difficult doing this is. I actually don't see this as a failure but as a learning opportunity. We and they will get there, its just very, very difficult and I think the difficulty is under appreciated.

We all use the automated features like POI, RTH, Follow Me, landing, heck, just hovering in place, then whine about it when it doesn't work as expected. I just wish we would take a moment to appreciate all of the engineering and software development which has made the miracle of modern consumer UAVs a reality.

Don't even get me started about the whole self driving car thing or the Tesla autopilot feature.

We all get frustrated when we turn the ignition key of our car and it doesn't start but I think we'd be amazed at the wall sized flowchart of decisions and testing involved during the first second of post (power on self test) when we first turn the key and the instrumentation lights up.

I know, it's easy right? You just grab a couple of wires from under the dash, short them together and we're off and running.

Some of you have even built your own drones and I commend you, but even at that, you grab readily available parts and controllers off the shelf and basically assemble it. Sure there's some tweaking of the parameters and basic aeronautical understanding to get it right but if you design your own flight controller with say a Raspberry PI using software you've written, I'll be really impressed.