Here are the mission-critical steps for performing a battery hot-swap while flying with your Rock LIDAR
Understanding the Hot Swap Process
Complete the following steps to perform the hot swap:
- Have a set of charged batteries prepped so you can bring them to the drone quickly after it lands.
- Land the drone safely.
- Ensure the M300 or M350 propellers have stopped after landing.
- Unlock the batteries on the back of the M300 or M350 with one hand while holding 1 (one) of the original batteries in place with your other hand.
- Continue securing one battery and remove the other.
- Insert a new battery into the vacant slot.
- Lock the batteries in place to ensure the new battery is fully inserted in the battery slot.
- Unlock and repeat steps 4-7 for the remaining original battery.
- Resume flight immediately after the battery swap. * You do not need to re-do your Figure 8's after take off if the LiDAR unit did not power down. Just fly back to the last point collected at a high speed in your mission and resume.
During the battery hot swap process your drone should not be on the ground for greater than 1 minute to prevent critical interruptions in LiDAR data collection.
Quick Battery Swaps Are Critical
This GNSS velocity plot from a sample mission shows the low horizontal and vertical speeds indicating the drone has landed between flights. The critical point to note here is that the duration the drone remains grounded must be less than one minute.
“The time the drone is on the ground for a hot swap should be no more than one minute. It should be a seamless process.” - Rock Support Team
Guidelines for Hot Swap Procedures that Exceed One Minute
We understand that issues can occur during hot swaps, such as miscommunication or a dropped battery. If the hot swap period exceeds one minute, follow these steps:
- Stop data collection on your Rock LIDAR unit.
- Treat the previous flight as one mission.
- Start a new mission for the subsequent flight.