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Micropilot only now gets a 4Hz GPS

Posted by Chris Anderson on March 6, 2010 at 6:00pm


We don't talk much about the older commercial autopilots here much, but I was amazed to see the above in my inbox yesterday. The Micropilot 2128g, which is a staple with the university crowd, has only just now upgraded to the 4 Hz uBlox GPS that we in the open source world have been using for years. Weird.


Micropilot's advertising has always bugged me because it's so transparently untrue. Take the below, for example (there are many autopilots MUCH smaller than this; ArduPilot, for example, is 4.5cm by 3 cm):



But Micropilots seem popular with universities, despite the high price. Why is that? It is just a matter of time before the open source IMU-based autopilots, which cost less than 1/10th as much and are closing the gap in performance, take over from these last-gen commercial autopilots in the education world?

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Comments

  • Frederique Pivot July 14, 2010 at 2:52pm
    I cannot give an opinion about MP, I have not tried it. I am in search of an autopilot for my project and I just say that they are the only one who have offered a 40% discount as I was from a university. ATTOpilot have also gently adjusted their price to match. For students or young researchers, good price and good reliability are certainly the two most important things.
    Thanks for your comment on your experience with MP. As I am trying to figure out with which autopilot to go for my project, every practical experience from other people is gold for me. If you could detail the issues you met with MP I would sincerely appreciate.
  • Dr Mike Black July 14, 2010 at 2:44pm
    LOL...micropilot...had nothing but headaches with it.....

    Done many many missions, accuratelty, repeatably with ArduP....no offence, but we have used MP in many attempts in the Mil spec world.....wouldnt touch it again ...ever....(and thats after spending some time with MP attempting to set up an AV) and failed...


    Just MHO..

    Mike
  • Frederique Pivot July 14, 2010 at 1:41pm
    Micropilot indeed offers a 40% discount on their products to universities. If the other companies were offering same kind of discount, that would help us trying other products.
  • Zachary Hazen March 10, 2010 at 2:20pm
    My university MicroPilot experience was less than stellar, with tech support that was not helpful and over a month trying desperately to get the thing to follow waypoints. Pitch, Roll, Airspeed worked great but we could never tune navigation until we limited max roll to 10 degrees. After that it did ok. Their manual had many many errors, and gave no instructions on how to connect the GCS to the MP2028g, unless you had a radio modem.
  • T3
    Rory Paul March 8, 2010 at 8:54am
    The Ublox GPS has been available for a while as an upgrade and I suspect the only reason they went with the 1Hz GPS units all this time is they had a cupboard full of the things (same goes for their advertising). As soon as I get the chance / need to I am upgrading my MP2028.

    MP may be a quirky company to deal with however their AP generally does what its advertised to do and once its in the air performs reliably.
  • High Society March 7, 2010 at 4:41am
    I have asked the same question before to some friends that use MP. Their answer was "the availability of the source code". As far as the GPS thing goes, maybe they are stuck in their ways and believe that their kalman filtering is essentially doing the same thing as UBlox is inside the their module to get 4Hz. I am just wildly guessing. Personally, I have flown UAVs for years using 1Hz GPSs without any preformance issues. That said, once I put on that uBlox and put it up in the air I was never going back to another GPS, the signal reception was awesome.
  • Adam Bellchambers March 7, 2010 at 12:24am
    We used a micropilot at uni for our UAV Outback Challenge entry, with the main reason at the time being that we only had a ~9 month timeframe, and needed something that worked out of the box, and with support available. Bear in mind that this was in 2007, so most of the cheap options were either non-existant, or very new and unproven, and we didnt have time to be developing an autopilot, as well as the rest of the UAV system. Our (Australian) university didn't get any discount on any of the micropilot products, but they were still cheaper than Kestral, as i recall, which was our other option. Also, being Canada based, the micropilot option avoided ITAR headaches for us, which can put a huge dint in a short timeframe.
    I think that the micropilot was the smallest autopilot on the market at the time it was released, and at the time we purchased it, and both their product lineup and their marketing material appear virtually unchanged since then, so perhaps its more laziness rather than outright deception.
    The groundstation software seemed reasonable, certainly better than we would have come up with in the time available, and the configuration process for both the GS and the aircraft was simple.
    If i was doing the same project again today, there is no way i would consider a micropilot anymore, they just don't seem to be competitive feature wise, for the price they are charging. The market has moved on and they haven't moved with it. Having said that, i'm sure there are lots of organisations such as defence and universities that are quite conservative, and will continue to purchase from them as they are an established player.
  • Peter Klemperer March 6, 2010 at 11:44pm
    Compared to (even) a grad student salary, that MicroPilot is dirt cheap.
  • Jason Lyons March 6, 2010 at 11:23pm
    I'm pretty sure alot of universities use MicroPilot because they give it to them for free.. and provide free support.

    I know if I was offered a solution for free with support I would choose it over the alternatives.
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson March 6, 2010 at 9:30pm
    BTW, Micropilot defines "big" as length and width, so it's only fair to compare the others on those dimensions, too.
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