Hi! I am an electrical engineering student at ISU, and I have a few questions to ask the community here. I am currently in a research group that is tasked with building a quadrotor, and then programming a flight control algorithm onto it.
First of all, in your opinion, what is the best software to put on a quadrotor that could be easily manipulated to achieve my goal?
Second, what is the best platform to put this software on? I am really only familiar with programming C/C++ (and MatLab, if that counts). I know that arduino is a very commonly used controller for quadrotors, and I have some experience with it, but if there are better platforms, I would love to hear about them.
Thirdly, what would you say is the best premade quadrotor? Are there any out there that we could get and dive right into the code and make it work the way we want? Or are most of them pretty closed source?
And finally, if any of you are reading this and thinking what an idiot I am, am I going about this the entirely wrong way? If so, what should I do to achieve our goal? (Which is to get a quadrotor, and put the control algorithm on it for testing)
Thanks all for your time!
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I'm a noob too, so take this as you will. Here's what I've located thus far:
Nearly all are STM32 based with open source c libs made for this chip.
https://github.com/PX4/libopencm3.git
The best performers/cleanest code looks like:
Germany 1. http://warthox.de/category/flyduino
svn checkout http://multiwii.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ multiwii
Australia 2. http://www.openpilot.org
git clone https://github.com/CorvusCorax/OpenPilot.git
France 3. Paparazzi/quadshot http://transition-robotics.com
git clone https://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi.git
Aeroquad looks good too, but I think many of these are forks/derivative of this.
Of these, depends on what you're going for.
Performance is largely a function of ESC dynamic response. For that ultraesc is gonna be out next monthish.
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1799000
http://vimeo.com/56557351
One that's too new to tell, but looks good is:
Switzerland https://pixhawk.ethz.ch/px4
https://github.com/PX4/Firmware.git
git clone https://github.com/cvg/px-ros-pkg.git
Look at the ROS libs for a variety of already built bot things.
http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/ros-platform
This one has operating system services available & what looks like (on the surface) a nicely modular & well thought out extensible code base built from scratch. So good be good for what you are talking about. There's a APM port to this going on now, but I'm not sure of the point of this--the original looks to be a better design & seems it would make more sense to put the bucket of features to that instead. There are some venture capital funding, marketing, backward compatibility support etc. issues embedded in this forum I can't seem to penetrate but which appears to clouding stuff up a bit & biasing things toward the APM.
Personally I'm leaning toward the Flyduino or Openpilot Revo for flying & the not-APM version of the PX4 for bot stuff. Or maybe the Openpilot Revo for bot stuff too. Their forum looks to have fewer members, but better SNR than this one. There's a forum on the PX4 site as well I haven't checked out.