06/10/2023

Flight Controllers

• PixHawk

  • off-the shelf piece of hardware/controller that can be bought off any website

• ZeroPilot (ZP)

  • custom made/in-house flight controller built by electrical team

• Sensors, etc

Jetson

• hardware that runs all autonomy code (code ran on the actual drone)

• essentially an advanced raspberry pi, but with additional hardware for ML models

• contains computer vision python repository

• geolocation - maps pixel coordinates to geographical coordinates

  • outputs “absolute” lattitude/longitude

  • given image with bounding box + information about drone state, gives lat/long. of landing pad (not sure about accuracy)

  • send to dronekit api - easy to communicate with pixhawk controller

  • MAVLINK, sends back to PixHawk which centers drone with Rgpilot

Descend the drone to 5-12 m above landing pad

Drivers

• UART protocol allows 2 hardware devices to communicate

• Dronekit → Pixhawk communication might need a driver