Discussions

Hi everyone, I would like some suggestion on choosing the right drone for a project that I'm going to start at university. The project is about a distributed robotic system. We have a general idea (and a matlab code) of the main logic of the system and now we want to test this code on a group of drones.

We have three main step here: 1) approach to one single drone, 2) multiple drone connected to one ground station which would emulate the real network (each drone would simply need to perform the proper relative motion asked by the pc), 3) let the drone communicate to each other and reason about its behaviour (so moving the “logic” to each single drone).

In fact, the first step is to choose a quadcopter and make some test just on one drone. We need to be able to control the drone through pc, giving at each time step a desired point to be reached. We have a camera system able to precisely measure the position of the drone and so we would like to give this information to the drone itself for navigation purpose or to use this data asking to the drone a proper relative motion; this also mean that the drones are going to fly indoor mainly.

For this project an interesting approach is this one:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/hardware-in-loop-simulation-for-co-operative-missions-using?xg_source=activity

We have a couple of Parrot AR 2.0 but I’m not sure it can meet our requirements long term objectives (point 3) above). I think that some open source solution will give us more potential for future development of the project.

The budget may be an issue: we are looking for something cheap (max 250-300€ per drone), so that we can afford to buy a certain number of drone – I think that 5 is good choice. My idea is that we can save money if we assume simple manoeuvre for the drone and that we are going to fly indoor and so we don’t need for the best performing flying machine out there.

We want to be focused as much as possible on the distributed logic so we would like to have something ready out of the box (ideally) to develop our test, so the less “hacking” on embedded electronics is needed the better is for our needs.

What would you suggest?

I know it’s all a bit too general but I hope I could give you much more insight and details in future.

Thank you.