Flying with the STARMAC Controller

In October 2008, Gabe Hoffmann (PARC and STARMAC team at the Stanford University) visited us in Salzburg to share his quadrotor control engineering experience and help us through some difficulties we had encountered with our control software. Sometime during this one-week visit, Gabe came up with the fancy idea of trying their STARMAC controller on our JAviator, just for fun to see if it works. Against our expectations, without needing to adjust any of the essential parameters, the STARMAC controller performed perfectly fine. Due to this, we got the great opportunity to test the JAviator's flight performance with a well-known quadrotor control software, which largely differs from our software architecture. The two videos below give an overview of the indoor and outdoor flight tests conducted with the adapted STARMAC II control software.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Silviu Craciunas for taking pictures and videos. Special thanks to Gabe Hoffmann for his visit and great encouragement.