If you are looking for a leader in UAV technology, Ascending Technologies(AscTec) sets atop the list. These folks have consistently produced ground breaking UAV systems since their inception. Their new Trinity offering continues that trend. Pretty amazing.
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Do you think that companies like Ascending technology, Aibotix and many others use or at least are inspired from open source platforms? Not necessarily they would use the code, but just implement similarly some nice features etc. There has been recently a number of new manufactures of UAVs and it is hard to believe that they all started from scratch with coding and designing their own autopilots.
AscTec defend their patent on the V very strongly that's why you don't see many. They are really nice people one of the founders bought the XUFO thing to market years ago. Its no surprise that many successful European business use the Falcon 8. The Ars Tecnica Sky Pixels are from them as well.
@Rob, do you think Arducopter Hexa can fly a similar setup with 6 motors instead of 8 ?
@Rob there is is always some trade-off as you always discover the longer you make these things. I am sure you are right. They apparently say 12-22 so I will take that as 12 with useful payload!
Rob_Lefebvre looks like 12-22 minutes based on their spec. sheet.
AscTec Falcon 8 Spec Sheet
The big disadvantage to mine, and probably the AscTec, is it's not very efficient with small props. Not long flight time, I was getting about 9 minutes. I notice they don't advertise their flight time, so must not be much to write home about.
Arducopter can fly that configuration fine. I flew a very similar frame layout, but was an H-octo instead of a V.
everything exept EM interference, RF interference, NO calibration
and thats HUGE
I am sure Pixhawk can do a lot of the same things, especially if it was put on a good frame and the feature set and ground control was reduced to the features the customer needed, for simplicity. You cannot plug in IMUs though--that is a nice feature. This is just a more professional, field-ready, physically robust, and hugely more expensive solution. I am sure it is finding a market. I really like the motor configuration and frame design and am inspired to try something similar. I wonder if Arducopter can fly that configuration well?
I think the falcon 8 is around 25k EUR. Not cheap! I think a well tuned V8 with pixhawk would probably perform similarly well. Astec seem very proud of their automated panorama feature. APM can do that too. The only thing I'm jealous of is the boat take off. But I think this is on the TODO list for APMcopter 3.4...
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