As Gary Mortimer noted, the forthcoming Parrot AR.Drone GPS add-on, which was announced at CES, supports MAVLink and can work with QGroundControl and the APM Mission Planner. I talked to Parrot at CES, and it sounds like they're going to leave autonomy to hackers and third-parties; the official AR.Drone software will support GPS datalogging, but not control, itself. They also haven't announced a price or release date for the GPS/datalogging module yet.
But for us in the MAVLink world, this is great news. There are now 500,000 AR.Drones out there, and the possibility for them to become real drones, with autonomy, could lead to a huge surge of people getting into amateur UAVs.
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The downward facing camera is supposedly also used for optical flow/visual odometry, which I believe contributes to its very solid stability. And yeah, it's a great machine that is very hackable (e.g. I put ADS-B on mine) and I haven't seen any of the problems that people have reported here--comments like the one about sonar pointing up make me think some people are commenting without ever having flown one.
This is good news! I've really enjoyed hacking on my AR.Drone, and it's out-of-the-box stability is very impressive. The inertial + optical flow + sonar + barometer sensor fusion seems to result in some awesome positional accuracy.
How will it send/receive data between the new gps flight recorder and computer? Is there a receiver that comes with it?
They might not be very capable now but my word they make the entire experience simple. With a registered user base of 30k people on their site and as Chris as said 500k sold they have trained lots of people the AR way. If I was a GIS company and I could buy a $300 unit to train my guys and then move upto say a $1500 unit from the same company that operates in the same way I would be happy.
Most people here know my day job for the last 25 years has been flying passengers in hot air balloons. This has hardened me to waiting for weather to be able to fly. I don't see the light wind thing as a restriction.
In fact again if I had a GIS company I would put a wind limit of 10 knots surface on my operators as experience has shown me often you can have 25-35 knots at 500' and you don't know it on the ground. I often wonder if that's a flyaway contributer.
Lets face it a quad is just 2 sticks with some motors attached. Very much like the world of RC cars or helicopters where people just add bling or buy bling. The RC trade love them because people up grade them with expensive after market bits. That does not tend to happen with aircraft. The work created by platforms is what will make some stand out from the crowd. Whoever makes the easiest workflow will win.
Tin foil hat and flame proof suit fitted.
Yeah, I don't really get it. So many people hacking on these things, but from what I've seen, they're not very capable outdoors anyway? Even 20 km/h gusts can blow it away.
Four jigs? Is that one for each motor? (I know, it was a cheap shot...)