I hooked up my new parachute on my drone
And it all went nuts.
I bet that tree is 300 foot high.
I am sure not going to climb that beast.
Maybe she will blow down.
[emoji50][emoji50][emoji50]darn it man
From your respons in this thread it sounds like you have given up on getting it back... which is fine, but the topic is still a worthy one and funny responses aside, I think it is worth posting a few approaches that may help people.
Unfortunately, I have a bunch of experience in this arena.
Drones are expensive so usually you want them back. batteries are expensive so usually you want the recovery to happen before the LiPo gets drained below the damage point. Drones in trees are subject to weather as well which can damage them. The recovery can, as some point out, result in damage as well. Drones dropping from great height or getting squashed by tree parts or whole trees in rare cases will result in damage. Seen it all.
Climbing may work and hiring a professional climber may work but thats not always an option.
Obviously an extension ladder is a simple soution but rarely do drones snag low enough down to accomplish a simple recovery... thats just their nature... they were born to fly high!
One recovery (this was a model rocket not a drone) we were in a heavily forested area of Poplar trees (not a high value tree and they grow like weeds) where simply cutting down the tree was not an issue and recovery was successful. If possible drop the tree so the drone (or rocket!) is on the high side when the tree hits ground so the tree absorbs the landing and cushions the drone.
We have had great success shaking trees to get drones out... but I will add that a parachute makes this less likely... shrouds on the chute make this an unlikely solution... but for a regular drone this was an option. And I am not talking abuot standing at the bottom of the tree and kicking it or pushing it... I am talking about shaking the top of the tree or shaking the branch it is stuck on. This is accomplished with ropes. Get a rope up high or over the branch it is stuck on and pull and release violently. Yes its tricky getting a rope up there and we tried many things and perfected a few approaches. Start with a fishing line and a weight on it and cast it up high or over the correct branch. takes a few tries. Once you have it over the appropriate spot let line out until the weight is reachable and tie on a heavier string or rope and pull that up over and if you still need heavier repeat that process with a bigger rope untill you have a heavy rope you can haul on. You need rope that is about three times the height in order to be able to bring the two ends together on the ground and go to the side and pull. Pull and release violently and hopefully shake it down.
Another similar approach is with a thing called a rope saw. Its a jagged wire rope with a couple of rings on the end that you can tie two ropes onto. Similar to above with fishing line and weight, only this time you have to get the line over the branch it is stuck in and at a location closer to the tree from the drone. Once you get fishing line up there, work you way up to the rope size for the wire rope and then once you get the rope saw over the branch its back and forth until the branch is cut off. Depending on t he branch size you may want to have someone catch branch or drone on the way down to try to save it but its not worth your life and branches are heavy so be cautious. Once you get good at casting the initial fishing line over, you can get it over as close as possibel to the drone and cut as little tree as possible which is better for the tree and the person on the ground catching if you go that route...
In one case it wa seither too high or too clos equarters or something and we could not use a fishing rod to cast the weight over. In that case we were able to rig up a servo to act like a bomb release on another drone and have the weight attached to the fishing line release from the second drone and drop over the branch... I will add that flying a drone with a long line attached is risky if you let the line go too slack and end up in the props but it worked well for us. We just double sided taped a servo to the bottom and used an unused servo channel to trigger the servo. Obviously not a Phantom closed system drone we used for the recovery drone... it was a home built with Pixhawk and lots of spare RC channels.
Yes we have tried using anothe drone to hook the original with a line and a hook hanging below... that just looked like it was going to get us two drones stuck in the tree so we gave up before ever successfully hooking one but that did lead to the above approach of dropping the weight.
Hope some of these suggestions help others fetch their drones and lets hear of other successful solutions.
And for entertainment some of it was captured on video
Here is attempts to hook and at 1:10 in the video you will see the weight dropped from above hit the tree thus getting my rope over... lots of pine cones... but this was a recover from 100 feet up, climbing was not an option and neither was cutting down the neighbours tree.
And another. This has some good footage in it of multiple things... First locating the drone as it was lost when out of site briefly behind a building tower. Also we tried coupling a bunch of long plastic pipes to reach up and poke it but but that was a fail.
This one was pretty funny... I wasn't much help but got some great footage and a lot of laughs... Some from the drone footage and some third party footage...
I probably have a few more videos hanging around but we were getting pretty good at the recovery so we were not posting the videos... this is NOT a skill I recommend getting good at... keep them out of the trees!!!
