While working on my Tiltrotor project I had a need to have CAD files of the Arducopter.  Since I could not find a good source for these I ordered the Arducopter and CAD'd them all in Autodesk Inventor and put them on GrabCad here:  http://grabcad.com/library/3dr-arducopter-quad-c-frame-and-electronics-1  I was going to do all the Electrical wiring too, but time got away from me and I figured I should post this as it is.

Here is the configuration of this Arducopter:

Frame: Quad-C

APM 2.0

11x47 Pusher/Normal Propellers

All Deans Connectors

3DR 915 MHz Radio's

So after demonstrating the "magic" of the APM at one of our meetings at the UIC Robotics Lab, we found that there really wasn't much concrete information regarding how stable the AHRS of the APM is over time.  We also knew that since our application was in an indoor (no GPS) environment, we didn't quite know how all that would affect the AHRS (yaw angle specifically).  And since we have some fancy robots, we decided to perform some real testing of the board.

Not surprisingly, we found that the APM is indeed a very robust system.  The image is probably the best representation of what we found:

It's definitely not a perfect system, as you can tell the Yaw would fluctuate by up to +/- 5 Degrees.  But for most people and most applications this would be completely acceptable.  For much more information and results you can view the wiki page here:

https://code.google.com/p/icarus-uav-system/wiki/APM_Tester

For a University Robotics class I completed a project that integrates ROS (Fuerte), an APM and a Kinect Sensor.

For some reason all the text that I had written was lost when I posted this.  I didn't really say anything besides what I didn't already say here:  https://code.google.com/p/icarus-uav-system/wiki/ROS_APM_KINECT

Hi all - I just wanted to talk about a project I've been working on for school lately.  I am interfacing ROS with the APM and a Kinect Sensor (over MAVLink) to provide target tracking and attitude settings to the APM.  Here is a video of this working:

The wiki and all code for this project can be found here:  https://code.google.com/p/icarus-uav-system/wiki/ROS_APM_KINECT