I'm expecting delievery of my Mavic Pro tomorrow, and have been reading up on the features ahead of time. I have a question about RTH.

If I launch in an area that has some tree coverage, and I therefore navigate my way out, how will the drone behave when it returns home. In otherwords, if there tree above the launch spot, will the drone return to the spot but hover above the trees until I navigate it in? Will it see the trees and navigate itself in?

Curious. And anxious to get started.

Many thanks.

Object avoidance only works on horizontal flight paths -- the Mavic does have downward-facing cameras and sensors, but I wouldn't trust it to detect obstacles and hover in place in all scenarios. Make sure you spend some time reading the RTH Safety Notices in the manual, which states: The aircraft cannot avoid obstacles above, beside, or behind the aircraft.

There are also important caveats about behavior when the Mavic is close to the home point that often suprise people.

Have fun!

In other words, if your home point is under the trees, it will come home and come straight down and land/crash into the tree top. Best to have home point in a clearing

There are 3 different failsafe RTH, You will read them in the manual, just set the one that suits the conditions you are flying in, be careful flying in the trees gps is not always great and gps can get blocked out,

Good luck with your new Mavic.

Yeah, if you're launching from underneath something, or even in a tight space, an RTH landing is probably not going to end well.

If your question is mainly about manually initiating RTH, you could do that and allow the Mavic to get close, but then cancel the RTH and finish the landing manually (and hope the RC doesn't happen to lose signal before you're able to cancel the RTH).

If you're more concerned about a failsafe RTH (eg. RC signal loss), then your best option depends on the nature of your flight. For example, you could set the failsafe option to "Hover" instead of RTH, but if you're planning to fly very far away, and/or over difficult terrain, there's a small chance your Mavic will be left hovering and you're not able to regain the signal because you can't get closer to it. Alternatively, you could leave the failsafe set to RTH, and hope that you're able to regain control before the landing sequence starts, so that you can bring it in manually.

If I were you I would do like this:

- double-check your RTH height to have it more than the tops of the trees,

- take off in a clearing with good distance away from the trees,

- fly into the wooded area and film whatever you need to film there,

- fly back out and finished.

You can always reverse the video in post production to have the sequence reversed if you so wish ;-) Anyhow - you will always need to produce your video afterwards. Filming and then just uploading the video doesn't work - without proper cuts and good choice of scenes it will simply not look good.

Thanks to all of you for your responses! Very helpful.

KJIsaacson Posted at 2017-3-29 08:25
Thanks to all of you for your responses! Very helpful.

RTH should be a part of your every flight checklist.
Set the RTH to your flight environment
Try to find a clearing then take off and if you fly under something then set the RTH to hover..