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Does anyone know of an affordable COTS drone one could try this out with? I’m very interested in the intersection of machine learning and control theory.

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There's a link in the article to the open source drone they were using: https://www.bitcraze.io/products/crazyflie-2-1/

For anyone who might want to buy that - it’s a horrible craft to use for anything but in a lab environment set up with a motion tracking system (you won’t be able to do indoor navigation using just the IMU and barometer) - using PCB as frame is not good for flight performance or durability. Any whoop would fly much better.

Author of the referenced work here. I have to disagree with this, at least with the motion tracking system part. The optical flow deck [1] works like magic and can maintain low drift positioning even when doing relatively fast and agile maneuvres.

For an example you can have a look at our video [2] (e.g. the disturbance rejection tests at 3:00 and after are solely using the optical flow deck)

[1] https://www.bitcraze.io/products/flow-deck-v2/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRD43ZA1D-4&t=198s

Awesome work! Can you share the titles of some of your favorite books or courses in controls and RL (for controls) that helped you in doing this project?

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