A flight stabilizer designed for ease of use and rapid customization, made for people with no prior coding experience.
What is a flight stabilizer/controller?
A flight stabilizer, or more commonly called a flight controller, is a small device that sits in line between the pilot of an aerial robot and its motors and actuators. It's made of two core components: a microcontroller that runs the flight software, and a few sensors to help it understand it's current orientation. The flight controller provides stabilization to all of the actuator command signals so that the pilot can steer the aerial robot around, even if it's difficult or even impossible to fly manually.
Why do I need a flight controller?
Sometimes you don't! An RC airplane doesn't need a flight controller because its design has inherent stability. A pilot can keep it in the air simply by directly commanding the control surface actuators. A hovering drone, on the other hand, is impossible to keep stable without a flight controller. In this case, the flight controller manages the high-speed motor RPM changes required to keep it from falling out of the sky. Then the pilot provides angle or angular rate command requests for the flight controller to perform. That said, you can still use a flight controller on any type of stable platform, like an airplane, to make it easier to fly or give it new capabilities.
What this project is good for:
dRehmFlight VTOL is intended to be a bare-bones flight controller software that is easy to quickly understand and get working with off the shelf components. All of the code is highly simplified and located in one centralized location, so adding a new feature is relatively easy to do. If you have a weird type of aerial robot that other flight controller packages do not support, maybe dRehmFlight VTOL can help your prototype get up and flying.
What this project is bad for:
dRehmFlight VTOL is not a full autopilot with autonomous features like GPS-enabled waypoints or mission planning; it is simply a flight stabilizer that lets you fly an unstable or difficult to control aerial robot. dRehmFlight VTOL also does not represent "state of the art" in drone flight stabilization. It is simply a learning tool that takes care of the difficult calculations and integration, and clearly exposes the fun parts of coding an aerial robot.
This flight controller is not doing anything new! It's just doing drone flight stabilization in a new way.
Aerial Robots Using dRehmFlight VTOL
VTOL F-35 Jet
A crazy fun to fly, fully VTOL-capable RC F-35 jet. dRehmFlight VTOL was used as the primary flight controller in this project to facilitate acrobatic stabilization in hover, transition, and forward flight modes.
Tri-Modal, Tri-Copter VTOL
A conventional tricopter that can take off and land vertically. It can also fly forward like an airplane. Oh, and it also spins like a helicopter. dRehmFlight VTOL allowed for all of the custom control mapping and mixing across these three very different flight modes.
Tiltrotor Bicopter VTOL
A mechanically simple, but incredibly capable and fun to fly tiltrotor. Two motors on the wingtips allow for both hovering flight and forward flight, enabled by the control mixer within dRehmFlight VTOL.
Cycloidal Rotor Drone
An odd propulsion system, but a simple tricopter-like configuration. dRehmFlight VTOL allowed for custom motor mixing to account for the unique forces and moments generated by the cyclorotors, as well as a unique flight mode that doesn't require the drone to tilt to move forward or backward.
Drone-Hydrofoil Hybrid
Flying through the water counts as an aerial robot, too. This project leveraged dRehmFlight VTOL's motor mixer and some extra altitude hold code to stabilize a hydrofoil at a fixed altitude above the water.
Flying Inverted Pendulum
A simple drone with a unique capability: dRehmFlight VTOL allowed for another IMU and control algorithm to be easily implemented alongside the regular drone stabilization in order to balance an inverted pendulum on top of it.
Station-Keeping Bicopter
A simple dRehmFlight VTOL bicopter outfitted with some extra sensors and control code for station keeping. Oh yea, it holds your phone to take selfies too.
Flying Drift Car
A drone that's as easy to fly as it is to drive a car. dRehmFlight VTOL was used as the flight stabilizer and mixer to translate control inputs from an RC car transmitter into commands to more easily fly a drone.