amb9800
Jan 24, 2008, 03:22 PM
Hi everyone,
I'm working on an autonomous helicopter project - we have a Bergen Industrial Twin (http://www.bergenrc.com/Twin.php) as the platform.
My initial plan was to have some of my guys develop a flight control system using data from an IMU and GPS and run on a small Linux board (e.g. Gumstix). This would then connect to a microcontroller for servo control, as well as to the higher-level onboard control PC (an XP-running Via Nano-ITX board) that does image processing and other tasks.
But because of time constraints, I'm thinking of instead just finding a sort of off-the-shelf solution for flight control. I saw the autopilot (http://autopilot.sourceforge.net) project, but does anyone know if it actually works (the site is a bit ambiguous)? I'm going to take a look at Vicacopter (http://vicacopter.com/index.php), but it seems to only be able to hover at this point?
Rotomotion has its flight controller (http://www.rotomotion.com/prd_UAV_CTLR.html), but it's a tad pricey ($6,000+) and more significantly, seems to be an all-encompassing and closed system with waypoint calculations, base-station link, servo controller, base station software, etc. all built in (which I don't need - my own software will be doing that).
Basically what I need is a unit/software that the onboard PC can control (e.g. so it can just set the direction, speed, etc. and have the flight controller do what's necessary).
Any ideas?
I'm working on an autonomous helicopter project - we have a Bergen Industrial Twin (http://www.bergenrc.com/Twin.php) as the platform.
My initial plan was to have some of my guys develop a flight control system using data from an IMU and GPS and run on a small Linux board (e.g. Gumstix). This would then connect to a microcontroller for servo control, as well as to the higher-level onboard control PC (an XP-running Via Nano-ITX board) that does image processing and other tasks.
But because of time constraints, I'm thinking of instead just finding a sort of off-the-shelf solution for flight control. I saw the autopilot (http://autopilot.sourceforge.net) project, but does anyone know if it actually works (the site is a bit ambiguous)? I'm going to take a look at Vicacopter (http://vicacopter.com/index.php), but it seems to only be able to hover at this point?
Rotomotion has its flight controller (http://www.rotomotion.com/prd_UAV_CTLR.html), but it's a tad pricey ($6,000+) and more significantly, seems to be an all-encompassing and closed system with waypoint calculations, base-station link, servo controller, base station software, etc. all built in (which I don't need - my own software will be doing that).
Basically what I need is a unit/software that the onboard PC can control (e.g. so it can just set the direction, speed, etc. and have the flight controller do what's necessary).
Any ideas?