Blogs

We are Phenox Lab,  a drone research group in the university of Tokyo.

We have posted the FPGA based quad-copter robots, which can fly fully autonomously in on-board system by conducting self-position estimation using visual feature points, which we named Phenox.

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/phenox-fpga-based-microquad-runs-linux

After that, we have continued to study the hardware and its flight system to enable these micro drones to proceed more practical applications. The main change is that the latest Phenox installs USB host function and can be equipped with Wifi modules.

For this change, users can install tons of applications of Linux operating system to customize flight control applications.(To know the detail of the our flight control system, please visit our previous posts.)

To suggest one example, we have installed node.js and websocket to the on-board Linux system to change Phenox to a "flying web-server".

Because flight control system and Linux operating system are running in different CPUs, Phenox 2 can hover stably even if the network connection is down.

Users can edit and compile Linux operating system in Phenox itself, so no need to install any other SDKs to off-board system. Off course, users can use "ssh" command to login Phenox systen.

The last news is that we have launched the Kickstarter project to release Phenox 2 very recently.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2040441468/phenox-2-a-programmable-drone-and-platform

If you are interested in our products, please ask us questions freely!

Thank you.