Final prototype assembled
We are really proud of having assembled our final prototype by now.
The rotor guards look really nice in combination with the complete system.
First stable flight with Vicon
Yesterday we managed to hover stable in different configurations for the first time in real life with external position estimation from the vicon cameras. It took us a long time but now we finally proved that hovering in different orientations is indeed possible with this system. So far the PID gains are the ones used in the simulation – pretty good result don’t you think?
Within the next weeks we’ll try to get it to fly even more stable by tuning the parameters.
And for sure landing needs to be improved as well 😉
First time – our own controller tilts the rotors to control the drone
We are getting there – our own code is now running on the flight controller Pixhawk.
We are moving the drone in space to see if the rotors are tilted the right way for hovering. For the beginning we disconnected the motors for safety reasons – so far so good.
Tilting test with the new Motors from Faulhaber
First tilting test with our new Motors we got sponsored from Faulhaber. It works really well, they are strong and fast and very small so we can fit them inside the ‹arms›.
Furthermore it looks really good with die hexagonal rotor protectors. The goal is to be able to start and land on three of them. Initially we wanted to make them round to have the advantage of having ducted fans which should increase the efficiency. After some tests we noticed that they would need to be quite huge to make a significant difference in efficiency, this means it they would be some kind of heavy aswell. That’s why we went with hexagonal ones cause they fit very well to our design.
First testflight
Yeeay – it’s working. Today we flew for the first time. What a great feeling. We used the controller which comes together with the pixhawk, but it won’t take long till we can try out some of our own controllers to be able to move the six servos as well and be even more maneuverable in the air.