I mostly fly my drone in very mountainous terrain. I try to carefully set my flight elevation so that it adequately clears the highest obstacle in the flight area, but sometimes my calculations are off, and my flight elevation ends up being juuuuust under what it needed to be in order to clear the highest hill.
No big deal with obstacle avoidance! Or so I thought… As far as I’ve been able to tell, the only thing obstacle avoidance actually does is save my drone from kamikaze-ing itself into a rock wall. That’s very much appreciated, don’t get me wrong, but I thought the feature would allow the drone to clear its obstacle and continue its regular flight path.
I’ve had 10ish flights where the obstacle avoidance feature kicked in and prevented the drone from hitting something. In all but one of these instances, the drone never actually was able to clear its obstacle. Instead, it just gets stuck in a loop where the drone will attempt to raise its flight elevation but only by 1 centimeter, then attempt to go forward again, but it cannot, so it will again attempt to raise its height by another entire centimeter - rinse and repeat until it exhausts all available battery life and has to return home.
So unless i’m misunderstanding how this feature works, my drone only attempts to adjust its height in 1 cm increments before attempting to go forward again… it goes without saying that this is absurdly, uselessly, low (unless the only potential obstacle in your field is a single small shrub 6 inches high?). On so many frustrating occasions I’ve had to abort an otherwise perfect flight because the drone was simply unable to clear a small obstacle in its path that couldn’t have been more than 20cm higher than the programmed flight elevation. In my single flight where the feature actually ‘worked’ to allow the drone to clear the obstacle, the drone spent 4+ minutes adjusting its height and attempting to go forward repeatedly, before it finally cleared the rock (exhausting 60% of the available battery in the process, so not much of a ‘success’).
What makes it worse is the Drone Deploy app doesn’t seem to let you make any small adjustments whatsoever to the flight elevation with the attached DJI controller. All of these aborted flights could have been easily saved if the app simply allowed pilots to make 1-2 ft ad-hoc adjustments in height as needed w the joystick (it appears that you can only make such ad-hoc adjustments during the drone’s landing sequence).
So I guess my overall question is, is this normal behavior?
I am ridiculously grateful for what the feature DOES do (keeps my drone alive), but I’m nitpicking here because it seems like with only the most minor of code tweaks, the feature could be made 10X more useful and drastically improve pilot experience -> just have the app tell the drone to make larger adjustments to its height before attempting to go forward again (or better yet, have a user-adjustable setting so pilots can customize that height-adjustment increment).