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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

  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson March 6, 2010 at 9:17pm
    Voice, where to begin? There are at least a half-dozen autopilots smaller than Micropilot (If you want to stack the GPS on top of any one of them, as Micropilot does, you can): Procerus Kestral, AttoPilot, Paparazzi Tiny 2.1 (which has the GPS integrated like Micropilot, but is smaller), the UAV Devboard, Picopilot, and ArduPilot.

    ArduPilot Mega's dimensions are 4cm by 7 cm, and it includes the IMU onboard like Micropilot.

    All of these are smaller than Micropilot, including GPS and pressure sensors.

    Marketing is one thing; outright fibs are another.
  • VoiceOfReason March 6, 2010 at 9:00pm
    Not defending them (for fear of getting caught in a crossfire), but it looks like they do include GPS in their size calc. And they have all the stuff on board (IMU stuff and pressure) as well. Don't know how "big" (length, area, volume?) your next product is (mega?) but with GPS it probably comes close to, or exceeds Micropilot. Its just marketing of course, similar to the $24.95 Ardupilot (which needs another $245 of gear to be useful according to this: http://www.diydrones.com/page/everything-you-need-for-a ).

    Someone should get the ShamWow and SlapChop spokesguy to market autopilots :)
  • Jack Crossfire March 6, 2010 at 7:39pm
    Pretty sure they always used 4Hz for the heli version. Pretty hard for an autopilot to be a last generation since they all do the same thing. Is there a next generation flying style involving upside down landings or something?
  • Moderator
    Sgt Ric March 6, 2010 at 6:42pm
    I believe that Micropilot has done lot of subsidizing of college teams as a way of cornering the market, just like Apple did donating to schools years ago.
  • Admin
    Morli March 6, 2010 at 6:37pm
    "take over from these last-gen commercial autopilots in the education world?" yep, It is just matter of time and we are already seeing more and more interest from students on their own or behalf of university teams who are walking and talking in DIYdrones , sooner or later they will realize they could buy 10 of these against MP or other commercial products and still have much more rewarding experience( of actually building the autopilot, programming, putting hands into the innards of working AP which won't be possible in case of any commercial AP without risking warranty getting void etc). However " the worlds smallest UAV " has always humored me :))
    I noticed the ublox offer with their AP as special news few months ago & made me wonder if ........
  • Curt Olson March 6, 2010 at 6:37pm
    I've never seen a micropilot, nor have I flown one (but I'm happy to comment anyway) :-)

    A university student that I know (actually, now graduated) really liked the micropilot. He was highly enthused about the ground station software especially. I think that also implied he was enthused about the setup and configuration flexibility and power to handle a wide variety of airframes, control surface layouts, and control strategies ... again focused on the power of their ground station software to set all this up for your aircraft.

    Chris: you are focused on the hardware itself, but the student I know was much more impressed with the software that came with it. I know he had some real micropilot flight experience.

    One thing I always got a chuckle from was that this same student (with a lot of UAV experience) was always very concerned to double check the ground station and the reported attitude of the aircraft before switching to autonomous mode. He wanted to be double sure the filter had converged, hadn't converged inverted, etc. etc. I would always give him a puzzled look because my autopilot never had these issues, but obviously other autopilots he had worked with in the past did have weird initialization glitches from time to time.
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