I work at a University and manage a UAS/Drone research lab. We have been using the Litchi app for some time now, and have had a lot of success using the pre-programmed GPS waypoint feature. While flying today I recently discovered a very bad bug in the app.
In past missions, if something doesn't look right or if it's getting to close to an obstacle due to wind, I have always been able to pause the mission and manually fly it away from the obstacle. Today we were flying close proximity missions next to buildings using the DJI XT thermal camera and observing heat loss. The aircraft used was a stanard Inspire 1. The wind started blowing the drone towards the building and I paused the mission to fly it away but there was no control, absolutely nothing. I couldn't go in any direction, it was not responding to ANY control inputs. I quickly held the return-to-home button which overrode the mission and flew up and away from the building. I canceled the RTH when the aircraft was well away and then had full control.
I wasn't sure if this was a one time issue so I powered everything down, iPad included, and powered everything up again. I programmed a higher altitude mission that would allow me to experiment and see if the problem happened again, which it did. Every time it's flying a pre-programmed GPS waypoint mission, if the mission is paused, there is no control over the aircraft, it just sits in the same spot hovering. If you hold the RTH button and then cancel the mission, you can regain control. This is too lengthy of a procedure for regaining control of the aircraft so I decided it was too dangerous and decided to manually fly the rest of the session. I got back to the university and tried it on a new Inspire 1 Pro, with a different controller, and using my iPhone 7 plus. Same issue with completely different equipment, no control when the mission is paused.
I just wanted to bring this bug to everyones attention so no one crashes their aircrafts. Hopefully Litchi will resolve the problem in future updates, but until then I will not be using the app. Why cant DJI just implement the ability to pre program GPS waypoints? It blows my mind that they do not provide this feature with DJI GO!
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