Anatomy of Flight.
One aerial vehicle, taken apart three ways — the body it is made of, the loop that flies it, and the brain that decides. Each is a live lesson that withholds its answer until you guess, then proves it in front of you. Every number on the board is computed by the Institute's open flight core, so the page cannot lie to you. This is our pedagogy, and the reach of Physical AI, in one machine.
Guess before you look.
Each opens with a question almost everyone gets wrong, an object you can turn over in 3D, and the one move that makes it obvious. Open them in order, or jump to the layer you want.
What is it made of?
“Its motors lift three times its weight — so how long can it hover?”
Take the aircraft apart: airframe, rotors, battery, wing. The surprising part is the one number the body decides — and it is not thrust. Endurance is energy over hover power; edit the battery in the live source and watch it change.
Open the demonstration →How does it fly?
“Tell it to go three metres right. What does it do first?”
The loop that flies it — sense, estimate, allocate, act. It has one surprising rule: four discs make one force, straight down the body, so to move sideways it must first lean. The controller on the board is the real one, and it recovers a shove on its own.
Open the demonstration →Who is flying it?
“A neural network flies this drone. How big is its brain?”
Something has to decide where to push. Here it is a network — 843 numbers — flying the real airframe live. It learned by watching the reflex, then flew the physics itself: shove it and it recovers, at a cost you can count in nanojoules.
Open the demonstration →The lesson is the source.
Beside every board is the lesson written in a few lines you can edit. Change the battery and the endurance recomputes; change the setpoint and the drone reflies it; the errors come back in plain English. Nothing on the board is animated by hand — the source runs the real physics, and the demonstration is what the physics does.
Guess first
A real question, refused an answer, until you commit. Withholding is the engine of attention — the same beat now available in every Institute course as a predict-first step.
It cannot lie
Every claim is checked live by the open flight core: the endurance, the tilt that makes zero sideways force, the 843-parameter policy recovering 24 of 24 shoves. Verified, not asserted.
Hardware to brain
One vehicle carries the whole stack: the physics of the body, the control loop that stabilises it, and the learned policy that decides — the three layers of an embodied system, in one place.
Start with the body →Take the course: AI + UAS →← All courses