Litchi Pilot - signal loss

[andrzej1]

I have been testing the beta version of Litchi Pilot on my DJI Mini 3 Pro for several days. I noticed that when the signal was lost, the drone started behaving very strangely. It spun around, raised and lowered, the gimabal went up and down. The mission was not continued. The RTH procedure did not work. I forced RTH manually. Therefore, I have questions:

• what should be the correct reaction of the drone to signal loss?
• is it possible to predict such a situation in the settings and adjust the response accordingly?
  I will be grateful for your help.

[TriBar]

@andrzej1

when the signal was lost, the drone started behaving very strangely

The Mini 3 Pro is a so called “VSC” drone (Virtual Stick Commands).
Have a look at this thread:

VIRTUAL STICK COMMANDS (vsc)

Virtual Stick Commands are control signals constantly send from the remote controller to the drone (stick simulations), and feedback signals constantly send from the drone to the remote controller. They depend heavily on a Constant Good control signal. DJI Drones that are build for the DJI Fly App are controlled by VSC during waypoint missions. (Mini-1-2-SE, Air-2-2S & (Mavic-3, Mini-3)) Older DJI drones are not, they fly by themselves. They also have an extra AIRCRAFT Setting: “Exit Waypoi…

[andrzej1]

I looked through the recommended thread and it shows that when the signal is lost, it should run the RTH procedure. This didn’t happen to me. Why? The RTH function should be activated in the drone settings after signal loss.

[TriBar]

The fact that your drone behaves strange means there’s still some communication between the drone and controller and the control signal was not lost completely, at least not long enough for RTH to kick in.

[wesbarris]

@andrzej1

I noticed that when the signal was lost, the drone started behaving very strangely. It spun around, raised and lowered, the gimabal went up and down. The mission was not continued. The RTH procedure did not work. I forced RTH manually.

Since you were able to manually initiate RTH, it implies that you had not lost the signal to the drone. If you had, you would not have been able to press a button on your remote which caused the drone to respond.

@andrzej1

what should be the correct reaction of the drone to signal loss?

The loss of signal action is stored in the drone. Therefore, if you have the loss of signal action set to RTH, the drone would return to its home point.

My guess is that your signal was weak – weak enough to interrupt the waypoint mission but not weak enough to trigger the signal loss action. If you use AirData, it provides a useful plot of the mission flown showing the signal strength at every part of the mission. If you don’t have an AirData account, I would create one. It is free and provides a lot of information about your flights.