For my senior capstone project in college I worked with a team on landing an early 3D Robotics quadcopter on a landing pad. We struggled to figure out how to control it effectively, and were also hampered by the need for outdoor testing during a Boston winter. The quadcopter may or may not have started ignoring commands and headed straight up and out of sight at one point, only to be found a day later in a tree. Commercial quadcopters have come a long way, it’s pretty great to see how much easier the stuff we struggled with is now. Definitely learned a lot on this project about the need for safe and reliable test methods during development.

For more information you can check out the the archival project page or the project poster