MagicRuB - Slashdot User

Comment DIYDrones post with more pics (Score 1) 1

by MagicRuB on Thursday September 17, 2015 @03:40PM (#50543719) Attached to: Researchers fly 50 autonomous planes simultaneously

Here's a DIYDrones post with more pics and details: http://diydrones.com/profiles/...

Submission + - Researchers fly 50 autonomous planes simultaneously 1

Submitted by MagicRuB on Thursday September 17, 2015 @03:29PM

MagicRuB writes: Researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA recently flew fifty small autonomous planes together in what they claim is a “record-breaking drone swarm”. These aircraft were built from lightweight foam wings with hobby-grade components, and were equipped with an autopilot running firmware based on the open-source Ardupilot project as well as a companion computer running custom autonomy software built on top of ROS and an 802.11n wireless device to communicate with other planes and ground stations. The researchers are using this swarm as a platform for advancing drone technology, and hope to see results implemented in agriculture, search and rescue, and defense applications.

Comment Re:How is this different? (Score 1) 17

by MagicRuB on Tuesday May 05, 2015 @06:49PM (#49624975) Attached to: Mark and Joel Make Autonomous Drones in Their Spare Time (Video)

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.

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