3D Robotics

The new PixHawk quadcopter controller board has some serious horsepower onboard! From the team's post:


"Its two Intel Core 2 DUO 1.86 GHz cores run only at 10% CPU usage with our competition software. The system has been mainly designed for future Computer Vision on Micro Air Vehicles research in PIXHAWK at the Institute of Visual Computing of ETH Zurich. We will use it to localize the MAV with pure onboard processing based on natural features. The current working state uses artificial features to localize.

Regarding our competition entry, we now reached a state where our PIXHAWK Cheetah ALPHA system not only hovers autonomously with no wireless video transmission using ARTK / computer vision, but also starts, lands and follows waypoints while detecting objects along the path. We're now optimizing the system to make sure it works fine in the competition itself. Part of these efforts is to build BRAVO, which has an optimized frame and electronics design and thus reduces the all-up weight from 1200g to about 900g."

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Comments

  • Could someone explain better what this does? If I understand correctly it would allow your quadcopter to fly towards different waypoints but at the same time visually recognize things on the ground? i.e. fly a grid looking for its landing platform and then land once it recognizes it?
  • Kontron board, see here
  • Does anybody know which single board computer they're using?
  • I'm wondering how much board costs ?
  • I wonder what kind of wattage those things get. They look nasty... and good.
  • Thats some serious power!
  • O' my God ! That's really great Chris !
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