hello, i’m looking for a pre-built drone that has sufficient hardware and compute capabilities under 1500USD. i want to use ROS to implement a SLAM algorithm, some autonomous flight and then indoor mapping/photogrammetry capabilities (ideally). this would require a high-end camera, 2d lidar as 3d is too expensive, programmable flight controller for autonomous flight/slam and onboard computer that is capable of real-time data processing and flight control.
the reason i am asking on this forum is because i saw some solid pre-built drones mentioned on the ros website here such as the Gapter robots.ros.org
but i couldn’t find anywhere online where they were actually being sold. are they discontinued?
if anyone has other recommendations, i’d be happy to hear those as well.
thanks!
Hello Levi,
ROS on any computer that can be carried on a drone, can only advise a existing flight controller. any linux ROS has way too many interrupts to keep a drone out of trouble.
The leading flight controller software the can work on a drone and is open sourced is pixhawk.
Main Docs at Drone Apps & APIs | PX4 Guide (main)
ROS2 docs ROS 2 | PX4 Guide (main)
I would suggest reaching out to their dronecode discourse chat. Lots of activity and you can probably reach out and find someone who can help you find a working OTS drone that can carry a ROS based navigation/preception computer.
I tend to use https://holybro.com/
Development Drone Kits – Holybro Store for pre built drones.
Pixhawk Jetson Baseboard Bundle – Holybro Store combines a flight controller with a Jetson.
This a very small and untapped market for ROS2 with very little details and support. So best of luck.
I have all the stuff but no time to put it together into a working whole.
So best of luck.
There is the Crazyflie nano quad which is in theory the perfect fit for indoor use. They’ve got a lidar ranger deck (one VL53 in each direction), a camera deck, imu + optical flow stabilization, ROS 2 integration.
In practice though… our lab bought two for evaluation and the firmware for the AI deck doesn’t really work, it can’t even stream video without it freezing after a few seconds and support is not very responsive nor helpful. Also you need to go out and buy an olimex jtag programmer kit to update the bootloader and upload any firmware. Not sure why it doesn’t use standard uart based flashing like every other off the shelf microcontroller.
The ranger deck may be better but overall I can’t really recommend them in their current state especially given how overpriced they are for what you get.
The DJI Tello EDU used to be a good option a while ago, but they’ve also been discontinued for a few years now iirc.