I am in the process of building my Arducopter and making good progress. I've hooked up most of the electronics and I've mounted them. I also want to mount the four obstacle avoidance sensors so that they are in place even though they will not necessarily be utilized in the early versions of the Arducopter software. What sensors will the coming official Arducopter recommend and be coded for?
In other robots I've used Ping ultrasonic sensors quite a bit. I've also used the Maxbotix ultrasonic range finders. It looks like the Aeroquad may use the Maxbotix LV-EZ0, which would be lighter and smaller than the Ping. Some of the Arudcopter discussion I've seen on DIYDrones implies that it may use Infrared sensors rather than ultrasonic (the pictures look something like the Sharp GP2YoAo2YKoF IR Long Range sensor).
I'm guessing that a variety of sensors may work if I customize the code to suit that particular sensor's voltage range/output/behavior, but I would like to stick with the recommended/official approach where I can.
Any light you can shed on the future direction (or your successes to date) with the Arducopter's obstacle avoidance sensors would be much appreciated.
--Robert Beatty
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There might be a possibility to use multiple sonars for this task. This is something that we need to experiment more