I and my friend Jaeyoung tested GPS Autonomous flight mode of APM with two quadcopters which embed APM boards.

One embed APM 2.6 board and another embed Pixhawk board. Both uses ArduCopter firmware. A mission of Auto-flight is taking off from launch site – moving to waypoint – hovering for 2 minutes – returning to launch site. We set mission up with Mission Planner which is a planner for APM platform. Refer to this doc for details.

The right one is the quad which embed APM 2.6. The performance is worse than the one embed Pixhawk. Especially it’s vulnerable to disturbances like wind.

Since the battery ran out, it went to fail safe mode, landed automatically.

In the second flight, two quads crashed because of the GPS error. It seems GPS data is not accurate enough, so I recommend to be very careful when you try an autonomous flight with GPS.**