So my friends and I have decided to have a DIY contest. What I'm trying to do is build a controller for RC airplanes that will autonomously perform aerobatics. My first two thoughts on approach are to try and build a controller and see how well it flies RealFlight 9. I haven't come across anything that is similar so I'm looking for a little guidance. I've seen some people make an xbox controller out of an arduino but I dont require any buttons, I want to do it autonomously. My second option is to go out and fly the plane and record my inputs from my controller and outputs on an IMU (awaiting shipment) and see if I can create a control design from there. Any tips are much appreciated because I'm fairly new to the arduino world. P.S., Gunner, Nick, if you're reading this, good luck 
mfletcher9:
So my friends and I have decided to have a DIY contest.I'm looking for a little guidance.
Any tips are much appreciated because I'm fairly new to the arduino world.
I thought DIY meant Do It Yourself ?
So your a begginer to Arduino and your project is to create an autonomouse flight controller for a model plane capable of aerobatics ?
Ambitious indeed.
I think you may be biting off more than you can chew here...
As I understand it, the microcontrollers used for drones generally use more powerful processors on a tiny (hence lightweight) board, and doing autonomous flight is a hard problem.
The air frame I'm using has a 3 foot wing span. With the motor attached, the plane could handle another pound of electronics if need be.
Autonomously controlling a model airplane is going to require a lot of instrumentation onboard the airplane. At the very least a very good inertial guidance system, as well as some way to determine your precise position relative to some external reference, otherwise something as simple as a slight breeze, different air density, slight difference in the motor speed, servo positioning, etc, will cause the flight path to be different, and over a lengthy aerobatic maneuver the errors will tend to accumulate. Might work in real flight, if you can set the program to fly under perfect conditions with no external influences and perfectly repeatable control reactions, but that sort of defeats the purpose of a program that is designed to simulate the characteristics of a real model airplane.
There is also the concern of just how safe this would be - you will need the ability to override the controller at any time if necessary.