I am a newbie and working on continuous problems from MK. However, MK is hard to control indoors. Then I found aeroquad and arducopter. Some videos of arducopter seem very suitable for indoor flying with stable pose maintenance. Then, the question came out. Does anyone can give a summary on these platforms, if I don't want to get my hand too dirty on hardware repairing.
Thanks!
Replies
Does anyone use aeroquad or arducopter?
Can you tell me your experience on the extendibility of the navigation software and hardware stability?
Thanks!
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.
Peter
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?