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Permalink Reply by Cliff Dearden on March 15, 2011 at 8:58am

I too would be very interested if any of the guru's out there could possibly do an unbiased comparison including why 2 guys

in Germany have set a standard and everyone else seems to be playing 'catchup'. Are they that brilliant or is it just extremely good marketing?

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Permalink Reply by Peter Seddon on March 15, 2011 at 11:18am

They were one of the earliest to market with hardware and code. They started with Flight controller, then Navigation board, compass and I2C ESC's. The Nav code is closed source whilst the others are open. They have a good website, good support tools for setup, code updating, trouble shooting etc. and lots of documents in languages other than German. I think their success is due to the quality of their product, the German attention to detail and the dedicated band of developers/testers.

Peter

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Permalink Reply by Howard on March 15, 2011 at 8:40pm

Thanks! I think MK solutions are not suitable for research purpose.

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Permalink Reply by Cliff Dearden on March 16, 2011 at 12:07am

Thanks Peter and Squalish for your replies I do appreciate them,

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Permalink Reply by Squalish on March 15, 2011 at 12:57pm

They've been around longer and have a much more complete product, simple as that.  Unfortunately, they close-sourced their navigation code due to paranoia over military applications, and none of the available code was in a free license in the first place.  The proprietary navigation code is hamstrung by a 250m restriction on range, and an inability to do autonomous scripting beyond simple waypoints.  The community, despite a strong effort, is very German-centric, and can sometimes be opaque if you have problems.

My lab's been using Hexa MK's for research for about a year now.  They make incredibly precise, repeatable flight paths, but they're expensive and we've had xbee / MK tool problems left and right since fall.  They survive crashes very well - we just had a 200m emergency autoland that ran out of battery and survived the crash with only prop & battery damage.

 

With ACM 2.0, we're going to evaluate making the transition this spring.  Fixed-wing flights using AP NG have turned out very productive as well - try to figure out if they would fulfill your needs.

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Permalink Reply by Howard on March 15, 2011 at 8:39pm

Thanks!

We are looking for a quadcopter for research. However, the MK tools, as well as the navictrl, is not opensource, which takes us much effort to implement our flight control & navigation algorithms. Additionally, the hardware is not stable. Thus, I am planning to turn to arducopter or aeroquad. Do you have any sugguestions?

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Permalink Reply by Howard on March 15, 2011 at 8:43pm

Does anyone use aeroquad or arducopter?

Can you tell me your experience on the extendibility of the navigation software and hardware stability?

Thanks!

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3D RoboticsPermalink Reply by Chris Anderson on March 15, 2011 at 9:35pm

I don't think AeroQuad does navigation; it's still just a RC quad.

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Permalink Reply by Howard on March 15, 2011 at 11:49pm

Thanks, Chris.
I mean waypoint navigation. Once the images and flight data have been sent to the ground station, the ground computer can handle the rest of thing.

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3D RoboticsPermalink Reply by Chris Anderson on March 15, 2011 at 11:53pm

Yes,that's what I meant. AeroQuad doesn't do that. ArduCopter does.

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Permalink Reply by Howard on March 15, 2011 at 11:58pm

Have you used PixHawk? Or do you know about it? Is it suitable for me based on their sources provided in their wiki site?

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