Those of you how subscribed to my YouTube channel should have noticed, that I got an interest in automated landing of fixed wings after RTH in INAV. And the sad truth was that, well, INAV up to 1.7 was unable to do it right. When landing after RTH was enabled (nav_rth_allow_landing = ON) and it was enabled by default, airplane usually started a 20 degrees dive to the ground. One does not has to be a prophet to figure out how it ended.

For example like this:

If not manual override, that would end up in a beautiful crash and probable full rebuild of an airplane.

Luckily, that motivated DigitalEntity enough to something about that, and yesterday I was able to perform (probably the first one ever) a controlled descend after RTH that ended up with an airplane on the ground without any damage. With enough optimism one can call it even a landing. This is how it looked like:

Current implementation is still far from perfect. Although it does not crash, it has a few small problems:

  • No disarm. Throttle is open all the time
  • It happily ignores speed. Both ground and airspeed
  • It also ignores wind, heading and so on

But, to be honest, this is a nice progress. Stay tuned for more changes here, since I'm planning to work on it in the near future.