Advanced Drone Drills: How to Elevate Your Skills to the Next Level

• READ MORE: Best Drills for Beginner Drone Pilots

• Maintaining precision and muscle memory: Flying drones requires good hand-eye coordination. Running advanced drone drills can help build muscle memory and keep fine motor skills sharp, allowing you to make smooth and controlled movements.
• Adapting to changing conditions and new technology: The drone industry is rapidly changing. New innovations are becoming available all the time. Advanced practice drills help you to integrate new technology into your existing operations with ease.
• Enhancing decision making in critical situations: The real world will throw challenges your way. From unexpected aircraft flying too low to flocks of birds suddenly taking an interest in your drone, if you fly long enough, you'll run into some crazy situations. Advanced drone drills help prepare you for the unexpected and build better decision-making skills.

• Precision flight in confined spaces
• Emergency scenarios and recovery techniques
• Camera control for cinematic and survey applications (NIST bucket drills)

Flying in Confined Spaces

• Setup: Find or create a space with well-defined boundaries. You can create this with two parallel rows of cones set about 4-6 feet apart. If you are inside of a building, you can use a hallway. At different points along the confined space, add obstacles such as hoops or barriers at different heights in order to practice height control.
• Execution:
  • Slow and steady: Start by flying slowly and steadily from one end of the corridor to the other. Look for straight-line paths from one end to the other.
  • Yaw adjustments: Once you feel comfortable, add yaw movements into the flight path so you make a series of 90-degree turns along the way.
  • Side to side: Run the course again with side-to-side motions as you move forward so that you are zigzagging along the confined space. 
  • Timed runs: For added practice, try running the course for time.
• Goal: If done correctly, this course will help you develop the motor skills needed and reaction time to fly safely in confined areas. This drill is great if you are mapping or inspecting inside an industrial space with drones like the DJI Matrice 4T.

Emergency Response and Recovery Drill

• Setup: Start by finding a safe open area such as a field or park. Use a landing pad to designate a home point. This will be your return location for the drill. You will need a spotter or a watch that can generate random time intervals. This way, random emergencies can be shouted out, like low battery warnings, GPS loss, or bird attacks.
• Execution:
  • Manual return without GPS assistance: When the emergency called out is a GPS failure, switch the drone to manual flight mode. This will prevent GPS from helping you fly the drone. Once the GPS is off, practice flying the drone back manually while keeping your eyes on the drone. Do not look at the remote. Do this several times at various distances.
  • Low battery emergency landing: When this emergency is called out, pretend the battery is too low for you to make it back to the landing pad. You will need to locate a safe area close to where the drone is to conduct an emergency landing. Avoid people, trees, water, and other obstacles while making sure the drone lands as soon as possible. Practice landing in progressively smaller or more constrained areas to simulate real-world challenges.
  • Obstacle evasion and recovery: When this emergency is called out, perform an immediate evasive maneuver to avoid the imaginary danger. This might include lowering the drone quickly or moving it out of the area it is hovering in. Once the maneuver is completed, reassess the situation and decide what the safest action is now that the immediate danger is avoided.
• Goal: Emergencies can occur at any time. With this drill, you should decrease your reaction time and be able to avoid dangerous situations.

Camera Movements for Cinematic and Survey Applications

• Setup: Once you have built or purchased the equipment for the NIST drone bucket drills, you must follow a standard setup before running the drill. For example, in one NIST test, you will set the bucket stands in a straight line spread out at ten feet apart from each other. Follow the NIST guidelines for each test.
• Execution:
  • Level 1-3 open test lane and scenarios: The instructions for the test are a little long, so we'll walk through the basic idea for one test. Check out the link above for the full explanation of the test.
  • Each of the buckets have a marker in them with colored circles or disks. 
  • Once you take off, you will position your drone so the camera can take a picture of the disk inside the bucket. The object is to get a full picture of the disk where you see all the rings. If the edges of the bucket cut off some of the colored disks, you will get a lower score.
  • Following the test guidelines, you will have specific buckets you need to photograph. If you capture the marker fully without breaking the outer ring, you get five points. If the outer ring is broken, you get one point. 
  • You must complete the entire drill in a set number of minutes.
• Goal: If you can complete the NIST drills level 1-3, you will prove you have the skills for cinematic and survey work. These drills are also a great way to make sure you stay fresh if you are already doing these types of gigs.

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