VTOL Airship Control Architecture

ArduPlane VTOL Plane
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Hey Guys,

Im currently working with a friend on an Airship. The goal is to make a vehicle that takes off and lands vertically and can tilt its motors horizontally during the flight. We chose to go for an architecture with 4 motor in H configuration for more stability during take off and landing and a reasonable speed (around 30km/h or 19mph). All the motors will be attached to the gondola below the balloon.

I have already started to look for motors, batteries and esc models.

But i have some remaining questions:

What about the controller hardware ? Any advices ?
What about the software ? I saw that arduplane include Vtol Plane but what about VTOL airship ? Would there be a lot of adjustments to do to accomodate the flight dynamics of an airship ?
Wouldn’t it be simpler and faster to simply rebuild the whole code from scratch rather than try to reuse bits of code made for planes of quadcopters ?

Thanks a lot,

Théo Hoenen

1 Like
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I think you should be able to configure your airship as a tiltrotor quadplane using existing features.
Take a look at the wiki and these forums to see how that might be done; a quick google search turned this up: Adding Airship / Blimp support

Regarding starting from scratch, consider that the “whole code” is around 1.5 million lines :slight_smile:

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The code does not know how the aircraft looks like, just moves the servos/ESCs…