Crash Test Campaign with IO Star drones

Drotek performed a test campaign in order to analyze the drone’s behavior & solidity during a freefall experiment. To do so, while the drone is in motion at full speed (around 60km/h), we decided to cut off the motor power, by triggering a kill switch command, once the drone reached a certain location in the air.

Thus we studied the falling behavior of the drone according to 3 different drop height scenarios : 30m, 60m & 120m (3 drones have been involved for the test).

As we can see in the animation below, the drone flies horizontally until it receives the kill switch command from the ground and eventually falls down to the ground.

Whereas the drones were quite high up in the air, no WiFi connectivity problems have been detected during the experiment.

It is worth to mention the only matter occurred when the drone hit a tree while free falling from the altitude of 120m.

When the drone felt down from an altitude of 30m, the outer plastic shell ended up with some scars but fortunately the propellers remained unaffected. We had the same result at 60m high.

When the drone crashed from a 120m high position, the drop has been smoothen by the trees. No damage was then observed and the drone even achieved another test flight.

Concerning the local Z position:

At 30m: The kill switch is triggered at 1:58 and the drone touched the ground at 2:01, the freefall lasted around 3s.