Building Your Own Drones: A Beginner’s Guide to Drones, UAVs, and ROVs

8. Building a Quadcopter III: Flight Control

Flight control systems are vital to a successful quadcopter. Simply put, it’s difficult to keep a quadcopter in the air if you have to manipulate all four (more, more!) motors manually—not to mention critical and optional features such as being able to manage the power needs of the motors, auto-level the copter, navigate via GPS, and switch back and forth between autopilot and manual control.

This chapter explains how the three parts of the standard quadcopter control rig works: electronic speed controllers (ESCs), flight controllers (FCs), and receivers. After we cover the basics, we will install a commercial Arduino-based autopilot product, the MultiWii, shown in Figure 8.1.

FIGURE 8.1 You install ...