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Goodmorning everyone,
I am happy to present the first Drone helicopter completely Made in Italy :)

• Frame Protos 500  Helicopter by MSheli (made in italy) 
• Flight Control: VR uBrain 5 by Virtualrobotix (made in italy) 
• GPS: GPS VR 8 by Virtualrobotix (made in italy) 
• System integration by Ferruccio Vicari :)

last month I had the honor and pleasure to personally meet one of Italian  developers of  APM Helicopter. I was intrigued by the fact that among the many cards VR ubrain sold to run multicopters there was Ferruccio, this is the name of our Aeronautical Eng. Ferruccio are 'working on it and  try to improve  APM Helicopter on  VR Brain / uBrain and  on Pixhawk . He is asking us to support helicopter  firmware and our hardware to be able to get their hands on it and make better flight performances.

Ever since I met and fell in love of his helicopters in fact the Virtualrobotix Lab, whenever possible, is trying to give support to his work trying to better understand how to help Ferruccio to solve the current limits of both the firmware and  hardware. Putting all this work then available to APM Community.

In particular the two innovative features present in the firmware version of Ferruccio are a curve of the management of the gas , 3 points that allows to associate to the management of the collective of the helicopter the power required to fly. And compensation of roll according to the pitch of the tail, both changes that actually make a helicopter extremely simple to flight like a multicopter

Ferruccio is in contact with Robert and the rest of APM Copter dev team for share the result of its work. The Dev Team done an amazing work on this version of firmware. Pilot a Helicopter or Multicopter now is the same no difference. 

In this video you can see the video of one of the many missions that the totally autonomous VR Hely is able to do without any kind of interference from the pilot it during take-off or during  landing.
here's the video:

This is picture of micro brain installed on Protos 500

This and 'the graph of vibration present on VR uBrain about the frame of Protos 500 and also of the solutions adopted to cut the vibrations on the flight control

Another feature is the non-trivial reduces vibration and also here Ferruccio did an excellent job inventing support can cut the most 'can make vibration and actually like a normal quadricopter.
So simple that I asked Ferruccio could feel myself with an old T-rex 470 to understand how different it was to fly a helicopter over a classic qudricopter pilot who now I'm  for years.
The result was sensational in the second flight I was completely able to control my trex 450.
Surely these means are complex and dangerous, you have to have skills to do a suitable setup and then you have to use them with care but as a result of flight times with petrol engines and payload transported there not comparison with any other type of aircraft, iVTOL,  plane and  quadricopter.
The video of my first flight with the VR uBrain 4.5 on my Trex 450

And that 'my second flight, never flown before helicopters ... I would say amazing :)

Here you can find many interesting videos on its marvelous Ferruccio helicopters.

https://www.youtube.com/user/FlybrosColico/videos

for more information to join the project mail me here : r.navoni@virtualrobotix.com

The VR uBrain 5 and its accessories is available here :

http://www.virtualrobotix.it/index.php/it-IT/shop-virtualrobotix/autopilota/vrbrainmicro51-detail

Best

Roberto Navoni