Whirlybird

As a senior tech elective class at BYU, I took a course on Control Systems. Our lectures taught us how to design and optimize various control systems, and we got to apply that knowledge in a lab. In the lab, we worked on implementing these various controllers on a whirlybird drone. We worked on adjusting the pitch, roll, and yaw of the whirlybird in order to control its position in space. The quickest and smoothest among the controllers we learned to implement was the PED controller. We modeled different systems in MATLAB, then implemented those same techniques in a Python script that communicated with the whirlybird using ROS. I learned a great deal from this course as we dove deeper into the mathematics of control systems as well as how to translate that math into code and how to interface that code with new systems.