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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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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