2015 was a year of remarkable progress in the consumer drone world, and not least here. As is customary, these are some of the highlights of the year on the DIY Drones and APM software development community.
- APM: Copter 3.3 released after the most exhaustive beta-testing process we've ever done (5,100 comments in the beta testing thread alone!). The biggest change was the move to an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for all sensor fusion, which is incredibly powerful in allowing us to bring in integrate new sensors as well as better flight performance. But the list of other features and performance improvements is pretty astounding, but puts this amongst the most powerful drone software stacks in the world.
- APM: Plane 3.4 brought those same performance features (and a zillion more) to fixed-wing aircraft.
- APM: Rover 2.5 sync'd all that up with a new release for ground rovers, too.
Overall, the dev team has never been bigger or busier. And the platform is gaining in popularity at an extraordinary rate, and is now the leading open UAV platform in the world, with an estimated 750,000 users based on latest firmware and terrain download data.
DIY Drones grew strongly this year, too (see chart above), with an average of 1,000 new members and 1.3m pageviews per month. More than 1,400 blog posts were published in 2015, and almost 6,000 discussion group threads with nearly 50,000 comments.
Meanwhile, our umbrella organization, the Dronecode Project, grew nearly 200% in 2015, with core projects such as APM and PX4 being joined by big companies such as Qualcomm, Intel, Baidu, Box, Parrot, Yuneec and Walkera as well as sister open source software projects such as ROS (Open Source Robotics Foundation) and OpenTx.
In short, it was a big year! I wanted to take this moment to thank all the people who made it happen:
- Randy, Tridge and and the rest of the APM Dev Team, who work tirelessly to invent the future
- Tom and Gary and the rest of the DIY Drones moderators, who work tirelessly to make this a great place to learn and share
- The members who gave so much of their time, ideas, help and inspiration to make this community thrive
You all rock. It's an inspiration to see what you make here every day.
-Chris
Comments
chris! keep it up! i am sure the Linux based autopilots from 3DR would make even a much greater story. i intend to use pixhawks for crop dusting on hexa frames very soon.
Ravi: great story! Don't worry, your wish is our command ;-)
@marc, i know about Navio+ and PXFmini but i am a hard core 3DR loyalist and would be very disappointed if the 3DR doesn't comes up with one. i tell you about pixhawk and APM, my skywalker got caught in a sandstorm this past summer. i was sure that i had lost the bird. about an hour later the aircraft appeared just 50 meters away from home. this is a true story.
Ravi: For sure. Watch this space.
Rob, you can get the raw data here.
@Rob: 2'600 is not bad for a species on its way to extinction..... LOL
keep up the good work
Gah!
Last time we looked at this, I remember there being two ways to measure it, and one of them showed ~1% for Tradheli, but the other was closer to ~10%? I don't remember what the difference was though.
@chris, I take this opportunity for a very important suggestion. the community needs a autopilot as good as pixhawk but on Linux platform and needless to say, same code (algorithm) as of pixhawk. I am sure something must be going on about it. I am not a hard code programmer, I am a airframe designer. in the past 4 years I hardly had any crash of fixed wing and copter crash was only because of motor's stator magnetization. I fly my pixhawks and APMs almost every sunday.
Rob: 2,600 for Heli (split evenly between APM and Pixhawk)
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