My journey with drones has been nothing short of transformative. What started as curiosity quickly evolved into hands-on obsession - designing, building, testing, crashing, fixing, and tuning aerial systems until they flew like extensions of thought. Over the past few years, I’ve flown and worked on a wide range of multirotor platforms, including quadcopters, hexacopters, and octacopters, each bringing its own aerodynamic quirks, power requirements, and control complexities.
One of the most challenging and rewarding parts of this journey has been PID tuning. On paper, it’s a straightforward control problem - tune the proportional, integral, and derivative gains for stability. But in practice, especially with custom-built drones, PID tuning is both art and science. We've spent countless hours on test flights, tweaking values, compensating for vibrations, center-of-mass shifts, or even slight manufacturing inconsistencies in frames and motors. More than once, the drone would lift beautifully one moment and flip catastrophically the next - teaching us patience, intuition, and the importance of data-driven tuning backed by flight logs and hands-on iteration.
There were moments when it felt like nothing worked - drifting drones, oscillations, unstable altitude holds - but there was also immense satisfaction in finally locking down a stable hover, smooth roll-pitch responses, or a perfect autonomous waypoint run. It's in those moments that I truly appreciated the beauty of tightly-coupled hardware-software co-design.
Outside the lab and competitions, I carry this passion into my personal life as well. I own and frequently fly a DJI Mini 4, one of the most compact and efficient consumer drones available today. It’s remarkable how DJI has packed such capabilities - obstacle sensing, precision hovering, cinematic modes - into a palm-sized form factor. Flying it during hikes, weekend getaways, or simply across an open field keeps me inspired and connected to the world from above. It also helps me observe real-world drone behavior at scale, informing the designs I work on professionally.
One dream I continue to chase is orchestrating a swarm of over 10,000 drones - a self-organizing, fully autonomous aerial symphony that blends robotics, communication theory, and collective intelligence. The sheer complexity of real-time coordination, collision avoidance, distributed sensing, and synchronized control at that scale fascinates me. It’s more than a technical challenge; it’s a vision of what’s possible when hardware, software, and systems thinking converge. I hope to someday be part of the team that brings such large-scale swarms to life - whether for artistic expression, environmental monitoring, or scalable logistics.
Drones, to me, are not just machines - they’re a convergence of control theory, embedded systems, aerodynamics, and creativity. Whether it's deploying a heavy-lift octacopter for agricultural spraying or fine-tuning the yaw damping on a lightweight quadcopter, I find joy in every part of the process.
Gallery
Here are a few snapshots from my drone journey - test flights, field debugging, mid-air payload drops, RC Plane and DJI Shot.
🛠️ PID tuning day with our custom-built hexacopter (spoiler: it flipped twice, flew once!)
🌾 Autonomous flight with fertilizer payload attached - precision agriculture in action
🧰 Repair and rebuild session after a crash during competition trials
🛰️ Ground station setup with antenna tracker chasing the drone across the sky
✈️ Weekend RC plane flights - from classic fixed-wing builds to ultra-light micro airframes, offering a fresh take on aerial control.
📸 DJI Mini 4 capturing Ithaca - Upstate New York.