Flying Car and Autonomous Flight Engineer

Nanodegree key: nd787

Version: 5.0.0

Locale: en-us

Master autonomous flight software engineering skills as you learn about drone robotics, develop sophisticated flying car systems, and write real code for real aircraft.

Content

Part 01 : Introduction to Autonomous Flight

In this course, you will get an introduction to flight history, challenges, and vehicles. You will learn about our quadrotor test platform, work in our custom simulator, and build your first project—getting a quadrotor to take-off and fly around a backyard!

Part 02 : Planning

Flying robots must traverse complex, dynamic environments. Wind, obstacles, unreliable sensor data, and other randomness all present significant challenges. In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of aerial path planning. You will begin with 2D problems, optimize your solutions using waypoints, and then scale your solutions to three dimensions. You will apply these skills in your second project—autonomously navigating your drone through a dense urban environment.

Part 03 : Controls

In the previous course, we implemented 3D path planning but assumed a solution for actually following paths. In reality, moving a flying vehicle requires determining appropriate low-level motor controls. In this course, you will build a nonlinear cascaded controller and incorporate it into your software in the project.

Part 04 : Estimation

In this course, we will finish peeling back the layers of your autonomous flight solution. Instead of assuming perfect sensor readings, you will utilize sensor fusion and filtering. You will design an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to estimate attitude and position from IMU and GPS data of a flying robot.

Part 05 : Career Support

GitHub and LinkedIn are both widely used by tech recruiters to find and evaluate job candidates. Get personalized feedback on how to improve yours! You may elect to opt-out of these projects.

Part 06 : Congratulations!

Part 07 : [Optional] Fixed Wing

While quadrotors are the ideal test platform for aerial robotics, flying cars and other long-range aircrafts leverage the aerodynamic efficiencies of fixed-wing flight. In this course, you will learn how to adapt the concepts you’ve learned so far and successfully fly a fixed-wing aircraft in simulation.

Part 08 (Elective) : Autonomous Systems Interview