Flying Robots
The course is largely practical, where students work towards implementing all the components that are needed on a modern flight controller in Rust. The different aspects are:
- Introduction to flying robots (multirotors and variants, fixed-wing, hybrid)
- Underlying physics models of the dynamics
- Control approaches (differential flatness, geometric controllers for attitude and position)
- State estimation techniques (Mahony filter, Extended Kalman filters)
- Motion planning for flying robots (optimization using splines, search-based methods, sampling-based approaches)
This course is being presented at the Robotics in Education (RiE) conference in 2026.
| Part | Topic | Lecture | Other Material | Assignment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction | Slides | ||
| 1 | Robotic Systems and Flight Dynamics | Slides | ||
| 1 | Rust | Slides | Code Examples | |
| 2 | Multirotor Flight Dynamics | Slides | Code Examples | Assignment 1 Flight Data |
| 3 | Controls | Slides | Assignment 2 Reference Trajectories | |
| 3 | Hardware | Slides | Data Logging | |
| 4 | State Estimation | Slides | SymPy Examples | Assignment 3 Flight Data |
| 5 | Motion Planning | Slides | Optimization Examples | Assignment 4 |