A technical comparison of open source drone autopilots (2012) | Hacker News Reader

A technical comparison of open source drone autopilots (2012)

online.qmags.com

67 pointsdanshapiro8 comments

Because it's a few years old it's missing the two big guns in acro flight: clean flight and base flight (and the drama between the two camps). Also some of the information about the PID controllers is a likely out of date and with some firmware there are actually multiple PID controllers to choose from.

But apart from that most of the information is quite good as a historic reference.

Good subject, but the article is 3 years old in a fast moving field, and displayed in a painful e-book program. Is there a better article available?

PDF can be downloaded here - http://delivery.qmags.com/d/?pub=RAM&upid=17487&s=OL&fl=othe...

This is really not "a book", but more a set of summaries of robotic subjects from a diverse group of technologists working in the field.

Each article contains extraordinary insight and is thus a valuable thing to read, especially if you are new to the subject.. as students and industrialists alike.

Even if its 'only of 3 years ago', actually the subject of software and robotics is decades old and has had its ebbs and waves of 'hot new idea of today' such that the subject is very dense.

In my opinion, robotics and autonomous systems is a subject now moderately impervious to the "not the new new" syndrome suffered by technologies, young and old. 3 years is just a blip.

Except CPU designs from three years ago are no longer considered current, and robots are built around CPUs (that is, if it lacks a CPU, it is not a robot), so three years is long enough to obsolete a vital component.

All of these are running on micro controller or similar embedded platforms that are are significantly slower to change than consumer CPUs. Calling them obsolete is not a realistic stance to take. Some of the hardware has changed over the years, but the changes have been mostly to the sensors used and other peripherals, they are still using the same CPUs they did a few years ago and they're definitely not obsolete.

> they are still using the same CPUs they did a few years ago

Not true; at the writing of the article, the Pixhawk board was using the LPC2148, and today it uses the STM32F427... who knows what else has been changed over the years as well?

Yeah, that's possible... I didn't go through all of them, but some had remained essentially the same, e.g. the OpenPilot board had changed some sensors but is still using the same CPU as far as I can tell.

But that's really besides the point, the CPUs they were using have not really turned obsolete like GP said. Even the STM32 F4 series you mention was released in 2011, before this article was written. And that's the latest generation of the STM32 series, so it hasn't gone obsolete.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com