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Early quadrotors had fragile stability margins and fine-tuned controls etc, in part because batteries were heavier, and microcontrollers had worse frequency/control bandwidth. Now both constraints are loosened so you can build very mechanically tolerant things.
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See my ex postdoc advisor’s 2016 TED talk (one of the best) to see what’s possible, especially the bit about asymmetric drones that just adapt to their physical form factor. I was in Raff’s lab 2004-06 when his group was working out Gen 1 quad control.
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(Raff’s one of my favorite people… rare example of a deep academic who also has a flair for public art and charismatic drama — he’s had seminal controls research papers and gallery grade robot art installations; was founding architect of Kiva, and drone display tech pioneer)
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Actually the bottleneck now may be 3D printer filament rather than control boards. Iirc drone rotors are printed with TPU filament.
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Necessary for damage mitigation and the ability to handle area munitions designed to overload the control systems of nonadaptive drones.
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Yeah, and I think you could now build production rotorcraft with autonomous adaptation capability… I’m sure there are programs for it If you were still flying you’d be disrupted 😆
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