dRehmFlight VS PX4-Autopilot

Since you mentioned programming, one other thing you should consider is the firmware. FPV drones typically run the betaflight firmware. betaflight is fairly mature, feature-rich and is aimed at racers and freestyle pilots. If you’re looking more to tinker with programing, you could start with this instead of a more standard flight controller: https://github.com/nickrehm/dRehmFlight

I have similar aspirations. No books, but if you want an example of someone who’s done that before, check out drhemflight. It’s not fully autonomous, but it’s a modular flight stabilizer running on teensy, which uses arduino IDE

There's several flight control systems on Github, such as Ardupilot, for example. I wouldn't undertake this without checking out what's already out there, all the way down to simple stabilization systems.

To add to this, most of the time one doesn't need to hack on the drone firmware itself. Just configuring/hacking the mission planner alone would go a long way: https://ardupilot.org/planner/

But if you're interested in more readable codebases without too much legacy headaches:

https://github.com/BossHobby/QUICKSILVER (for indoor drones mostly)

And for even less functionality but a good learning tool kind of codebase:

https://github.com/nickrehm/dRehmFlight

dRehmFlight is about the simplest a flight controller can get (in terms of code readability).

This is actually my own flight controller code running on a teensy 4.0 microcontroller, coded in arduino: https://github.com/nickrehm/dRehmFlight

They are widely used in narrow circles :)

Two of (arguably the best) open source RC aircraft flight controllers (ArduPilot and PX4) are using extended Kalman filters in their state estimators (essentially sensor fusion that provides attitude/position estimate):

https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/tree/master/libraries...

https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot/blob/main/src/modules/e...

I'm not that familiar with cleanflight/betaflight/inav scene to know what the FPV racer flight controllers use.

Actually, even the General Aviation pilots who actually manually manage their own load-shedding during a mission would quite like automated power distribution and management systems... and if you felt like taking on that sort of work as a hobby project to cut your teeth, I bet the guys at the (open-source) PX4 project would bite your hand off...

As a flight pilot engineer you have to find a sweet spot and balance logging too much and too little. Writing logs to an SD card has huge costs that come with it, that's why you don't want to log too much. Logging too little and you can't debug issues later on properly.

PX4 also has lots of "topics" logged at around 1/10, e.g. hover thrust estimate every 100ms:

https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot/blob/main/src/modules/l...

Okay, but nowadays most people talk about “Pixhawk” as an open-standard hardware platform and PX4 as the software. The source code is at https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot and they call themselves “PX4 Autopilot Software”.

As an example, PX4 is a popular open source drone autopilot software: https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot

I am working as a Remote Embedded Software developer for quite a while now and there is no obstacle in Remote work. If I am missing anything, parts are arriving in under the week. That said, I never had a better work-life balance in the last 10 years. Anyone who said Embedded is not possible to do remotely just check any open source flight controller project (in my case PX4).