Engineer Builds Self-Balancing Pole Using Drone Propellers

Aerospace engineer Peter Ryseck explored the engineering challenges behind keeping a flexible pole upright with a quadcopter-style control system. When his first version proved wildly unstable, Ryseck swapped its large 10-inch drone propellers, which couldn’t change speed quickly enough, for smaller 5-inch propellers and added a dynamic notch filter to cancel out the flexible pole’s natural vibrations. He also revised the flight software to gradually correct its sense of vertical so the pole learns to lean into a steady wind, which helped the self-balancing pole stand for more than three hours in Munich’s Olympiapark.

Balancing a pole turned out to be a lot harder than I was expecting… But lots of fascinating controls questions were revealed with it!

Ryseck, a flight dynamics engineer at Joby Aviation, got his start in engineering building RC planes in his parents’ basement.