New feature: Reduce speeds for fast yaw and gimbal changes during video missions

A flight plan often contains places where the drone has to turn in an overall small confined area. If this situation is combined with a rather high global mission speed the yaw will change quickly at this location. This might be entirely fine for photo missions, but not so for video missions: Instead of getting nice panoramic footage the camera (i.e. the drone) will turn too quickly leading to a footage the human eye can not properly follow. The same argument holds for a rather large gimbal change along a small flight distance.

Traditionally flight planning software offers the user to set a global mission speed, this is the speed the drone cannot exceed throughout the whole mission. Additionally on-board software controls how the drone has to accelerate and decelerate in order to follow the flight path given as a sequence of waypoints in space. Yet the fact that sudden gimbal and yaw  changes should also be considered to determine a proper speed for the drone is forgotten.

Harmonys Flight Planner is now taking into account how quickly gimbal and yaw are changing along a flight path. Whenever the user wants to record a video, it offers to automatically (and locally) reduce the flight speed whenever the gimbal and yaw change would be too fast for a smooth video footage. This feature contributes to our efforts to provide drone pilots with a software tool for professional aerial cinematography.

Below you can watch the footage of one of our recent test flights with a Phantom 4 Pro: