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Introduction to PixHawk ground control station (including source code)

Posted by Chris Anderson on April 4, 2010 at 8:00pm

Operator view

In our discussion the other day about what programming language to use for our next generation of ArduPilot Ground Control Station (GCS), I mentioned the PixHawk GCS, which is written in Qt. I've been in touch with Lorenz Meier, the team leader, and he's been super helpful in explaining the project and sharing code (see below). We're considering basing the ArduPilot Mega GCS on this code, so this is an opportunity for the community here to check out the code and evaluate how appropriate it is for us.

PixHawk in a general-purpose Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) platform. The first version is a small coaxial helicopter that won first prize in the 2009 European Micro Air Vehicle Indoor Autonomy Competition. It's got an x86 computer onboard, running Linux. Since then, the project has expanded to include a quadcopter and a full open source robotics computer vision toolkit.

Here's a video showing the progress to the competition win:



Although there are lots of impressive aspects of the project that may be of use to us, we're now focusing on the groundstation. Here, from the project's website, is the project description:

"The groundstation is the only interface to an autonomous operating
robot. Even when not operating autonomously, e.g. during system tests,
just a joystick or the remote control is not enough as measurement
values have to be available in real-time and configuration settings have
to be changed.



Features

  • Multi-MAV support
  • Support for rotary and fixed-wing (Airplanes, helicopters, coaxial and quadrotor designs)
  • Joystick control
  • Voice/Audio output tested on Mac


Implementation

  • Cross-platform: Windows, Linux, MacOs, Maemo
  • Open Source (GPLv3+)
  • C++, Qt 4.6 based
  • Look and Feel completely customizable




Supported Hardware

  • Any PC/Mac
  • iPad
  • Smartphones (iPhone, Nokia N900, currently untested)"


Here are some other views of the interface:

Engineer view


Parameter / Settings / MAVLink View


Pilot view

The source code (in zip and rar forms) is now hosted here.

There is a very complete API, with documentation here.

They're just cleaning up the code a bit, and once they do the latest versions will be hosted on github here.

I'm no programmer, but I've been very impressed by what I've seen so far. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm leaning towards recommending that our team start with PixHawk
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Comments

  • Richard Warrender April 6, 2010 at 3:58am
    Mac support would be great! What map service is it using? Doesn't look like the standard Google Maps.
  • Wyliest April 4, 2010 at 8:39pm
    That looks so much better then what I have tryed to do in Processing.
  • Scott Plunkett April 4, 2010 at 8:22pm
    It looks like they have done a pretty complete job on building up a back end which might allow the team MORE time to spend on the part we will all see and use - the UI.
This reply was deleted.