Autonomous apps eat battery quicker?

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I 'think' my flights with Autopilot are shorter than when I fly without it.

Was wondering since Autopilot has the ability to set the tolerance constraints on altitude from 3 to 16 meters, if setting the altitude to a tighter 3 meters if that means the processing inside the drone is sampling more of the GPS and barometer sensors to maintain a tighter altitude and eating up the battery quicker by doing so?

Default was 16 meters and might be the same for GO too. Today I tightened it to 3 meters tolerance and it seemed shorter on the flight. My video files usually are two 4GB ones and one half that, but today was only 2 files before the FAT size restriction of 4GB. Seemed the battery dropped faster. Don't know?
 
Sensor activity is trivial in terms of the battery, so this wouldn't make any difference.

However, tighter tolerances will mean more frequent control actuation of the motors, consuming more power.

Similar phenomena comparing S/P mode to A... if you were to switch to ATTI mode and just let your aircraft drift away, it would fly quite a bit longer at that altitude than letting it hover in place in S/P mode until the battery was exhausted.
 
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interestingly two of us lifted off with identical P4s , one with a pre-planned Litchi mission and me just flying in P mode. I followed along his path, higher and behind for a while and cut the corner on his plan and "found" him a little later (his flight distance was much greater than mine), both birds landed within a minute of each other. We happened to compare batteries, my P mode flight was a good 15% or so less left than his. My speeds varied a lot more than his did, that is the only thing we could think of why my battery drained quicker. I think the autopilot flights on Litchi likely make things smoother than someone on the sticks.
 
Sort of like cruise control and pumping the gas manually.
 

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