IF YOU CAN DREAM IT, YOU CAN FLY IT
About Me...
My name is Nicholas Rehm and I've been an avid radio controlled hobbyist for 15+ years. In my early days building foam RC airplanes circa 2010, I quickly fell in love with the idea of building not just simple airplanes and helicopters, but aerial robots. Specifically, the type that can hover, transform, carry sensors, and do cool things all on their own.
I found that the learning curve to break out from simple toy airplanes and helicopters to proper aerial robotics was both steep and unfriendly to people like me who didn't have a formal education in engineering, math, or robotics. What was a PID controller? What is a matrix and why do I need to invert it? I just wanted to put a sensor on a drone and have it do something cool, but nobody could communicate to me how in simple layman's terms. The research papers and math equations felt like a foreign language to me.


Fast forward to 2021 and I had graduated with two degrees in aerospace engineering with a concentration in aerial robotics. Finally, I could understand and speak the language of advanced aerial robotics (and invert a matrix...sometimes). But with this new formal educational background, I didn't want to leave everyone else behind who hasn't yet, or didn't have the resources to, learn all of the things that I had.
In school, I quickly realized that you don't need to be fluent in all of the fancy math and software they teach you in order to make a really cool and useful aerial robot. It seemed there was a severe communication problem in the field that practically gatekept all of these exciting topics from people that weren't already experts in the field.
The dRehmFlight project is my initiative to make advanced aerial robotics something that everybody can understand and participate in.
How I Am Doing This...
I run an educational YouTube channel with over 100,000 followers where I build and showcase cool aerial robotics projects. My goal is to lure you in with a flashy project that may or may not actually be useful, then trick you into learning about the things that made it possible like PID tuning, trajectory planning, optical flow, or novel airframe design. My approach is unconventional by design; I want everything I do to be friendly to people outside of the field.

The backbone of most of my projects is my opensource flight controller software, dRehmFlight VTOL. I started this project while in school because I was frustrated by the large learning curve of other drone flight controller software packages. I just needed a simple flight controller that took care of the interfacing to the radio, motors, and servos, and let me write some dumb code to go try out a new sensor, control method, or general flight concept. I did my best to make this flight controller accessible to everyone--no software background required, plus tons of detailed documentation.
Finally, this website is intended to be a central hub for all of the things I do: projects, files, code, and resources to help demystify complex topics in aerial robotics and get you flying your own aerial robot with as little frustration as possible. If you've found any of these free resources useful and would like to support future work, you can donate directly: