The difference is they are reinventing the wheel. This has already been done on open hardware and open source projects like RPi /w NAVIO and BBB /w PX4. So they wanted to use Edison, I get that, but what you do is slap the NAVIO on an Edison shield from Sparkfun and maybe write a little glue logic driver and you call it a day.
They are duplicating sensors because they can't read the data stream and they intentionally choose to go with a closed-source one. They blame compass noise on building re-bar and telephone poles and didn't mention the 4+ spinning magnets that are a few centimeters from the compass sensor. I smell incompetency.
Their time would be *much* better spent contributing to an opensource project like PX4/ArduPilot where all these problems have been solved and most work these days are focusing on high level stuff which is their goal in the first place.