What I've been working on

I wanted to make a post showing what I've been working on (and maybe start a discussion because I think a lot of us are lonely atm). My eventual goal is to get drones to fly in formation, both around the player craft and following automated routines. This is a long way off, but I think I've made good progress in the last few days.

Step 1 was making the drone flight controller, and this is fully complete! I went with PID based controllers and that worked very well. I broke the program up into 4 axis, roll, pitch, yaw, and altitude, and had a PID controller for each axis (technically 2 for the roll & pitch).

The way the throttle works is by treating the inputs (increase/decrease throttle) as vertical velocity. This makes it very easy to fly, because it hovers perfectly when you're not touching anything.

The orientation controls were more difficult, but I eventually got those working too. Similar to the throttle, the drone auto-centers itself when you stop touching any controls. Not pictured is yaw, which works how you'd expect as well.

The next step towards formation flying is getting position and orientation info from the other crafts. This is what I'm still working on, but I have a rudimentary version up and running.

Working around the limitations of running vizzy unmanned craft was (and will probably continue to be) a headache. But, I got it working by finding the host craft ID by name and doing all position and orientation calculations manually. This rover currently just points at the target craft and drives towards it at a set speed, but my next steps are going to be towards getting it to stop at a target, and later hold relative position to a moving target.

I don't intend to stay on the ground, but 2 dimensions is easier than 3, so I like to use land vehicles initially. The nice thing about using directional rovers like this, is that I should be able to use the program on traditional aircraft as well as drones. I have no idea how far I'll be able to go with vizzy, but the capabilities have surpassed my expectations so far, and I'm excited for what it'll be able to do.

Feel free to hit me with questions/comments about any of this. Cheers!

Edit: Link to the drone ;)