Using Drone Racing League to learn how to fly a Quad

Introduction

This blog is going to use a more casual atmosphere as it is my personal experience learning how to fly a drone and less on the informative side.

Simulators are something that full-scale pilots use to get practice on an aircraft. They might be learning the aircraft for the first time, trying to experience a specific failure or just practicing. Either way, they are not at an actual risk to the public, and they aren't risking a potentially very expensive fix if the plane does crash, obviously as it's digital. This same method is what caused me to turn to the Drone Racing Simulator (DRL) available on steam. This "game" allows someone to connect a controller to their computer and control a digital drone in the same way that one would in real life. 

Learning How a Quad Works

The Tutorials

I have had minimum experience flying real quads when I came into the program. The most experience I have had is using a DJI Mavic Pro, a very stable and popular platform for many beginners and professionals alike because of how easy it is to fly. This was great to build a little confidence with an aircraft but I was still very nervous to fly it due to its extreme cost and lack of experience. So I jumped on DRL and started up a few tutorials in the basic flight mode. This made the quad behave exactly like a DJI Mavic Pro, locking the max tilt allowed and stabilizing itself for me when the controls were released, something the Mavic does too. As I build up about 5 hours of flight time on the basic controls I quickly wanted a little more of a challenge and switched to the intermediate mode and intermediate tutorials. This locked your maximum tilt but wouldn't self stabilize and after many crashes, I started to get the hang of it. Though I quickly realized that although it was called the intermediate mode I found the full acro mode easiest to fly and dodge obstacles because of the ability to move the drone 360 degrees in all directions, allowing for the force from the motors to point in any direction. Figure 1 is of the flight modes in DRL and their descriptions. At this point, I had put in about 10 hours total into the sim and had built up a bit of confidence.

Figure 1: The start menu before you go into a game with the modes listed

Rates

The next thing that I had to tackle was the rates, for a typical gamer this is like the sensitivity, allowing me to do flips very quickly or slowly based on the values. The starter values that DRL used were pretty slow and made learning the controls easy as a small bump wouldn't spin me in a random direction and confuse me more as I was trying to learn them. As I got more confident though I wanted the ability to do quick flips and cool maneuvers like you see on youtube. A friend ended up giving me values that he uses on his freestyle drone so that I would have a starting point to get used to and to feel what it would be like to fly one of his drones. These rates were much more sensitive and a simple full stick maneuver to one side would send the drone into countless flips. This was more to my liking and I quickly became accustomed to the rates after a few hours of freestyle flying. Figure 2 is of my current rates in DRL.

Figure 2: My personal rates

Cruising around

One of my favorite things in DRL was the size of the maps, having played quite a few video games in my time a typical map like in Call of Duty or similar game is usually pretty small. It was to my surprise that the maps in DRL were very big, some having a shipping center complete with cargo containers and a container ship, and a forest with a city nearby... all on the same map. This provides a fantastic experience being able to fly around between many different areas without being struck with a loading screen. It was about this time as I started building about 30 hours behind the sticks that I was getting pretty confident and starting to figure out the cool and complex aerobatic maneuvers that one will see when they type in "freestyle fpv" on youtube.

Racing

As I became more and more confident (around 40 hours) I started to race on the digital courses that they have available. As the sim is a racing simulator there is no shortage of tracks of varying difficulty and allowed me to become pretty good at racing. Although the process took a long time and I was constantly beaten by my friends who would also race alongside me in the lobby I slowly build more time up and soon started getting competitive to them at around 75 hours of flight time in the game.

Conclusion

It was around the 50-hour mark of flight time that my friend allowed me to try flying one of his real freestyle quads that he was going to be decommissioning soon, so he wasn't that big of a deal if I broke something, this defiantly made me a little less nervous, but I was still pretty nervous to go out there and fly something real around. I can happily report that in the 2 batteries that I flew that day I didn't crash once, although landing was "interesting" as that's something that you don't have to do in DRL and in all my hours of practice I didn't think of practicing that. 

I can confidently say that I am pretty decent with a quad now and I can say that it is all thanks to DRL and allowing me to build confidence behind the sticks without risking an actual drone.