Flying

It is easy to make an object move towards a point in space by gradually setting its position closer and closer to the said point. However, when that object has to move itself with three rotational motors and a main thruster, and it has inertia but no drag, the problem immediately becomes a bit harder. In the video, the ship uses the said controls to fly to the set point and orientation. Many things need to be considered here. The ship has thrusters for pitch, yaw and roll and also a main linear forward thruster and smaller lateral thrusters to all other five directions. It uses the necessary information to determine how it should fly to get to the desired pose. This means, for example, that for it to stop it usually has to make a 180 degree turn well before the target point for a braking thrust. Once the velocity is small enough, it can do fine control with lateral thrusters to get to the wanted location and orientation.

Please do not mind the background noises in the video. The mic was left open I couldn’t be bothered to remove the audio from it.