Mainline support/advise of choosing the products
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Hey guys,
We are looking for some ready-to-fly drones for a project and I believe your drones could fit our requirements. So far, we've been developing using custom-built drones, but we decided to switch to ready-to-fly platforms to save some work. However, I have two doubts about the platforms.
(1) Regarding the autopilot; we've only been developing so far using Pixhawk and we put some minor changes on top of the PX4 main (1.14) build that are required for our approach to work. Is it possible to flash the main PX4 build on your drones? Are you conducting some tests with the drones using the main PX4 build?
(2) We are using ROS2 to control the drones. Initially, we were planning to use the Seeker drone for initial tests (which have some risk of crashing, so a lighter platform is beneficial) and switch later to the Sentinel drone to increase endurance when the code is proven to work. However, if I understand correctly, the Seeker drone uses older hardware and it might be hard to run ROS2 on it, is that correct? Is the flight controller hardware the same for Seeker and Sentinel, so we can test the PX4 modifications on Seeker and then switch to Sentinel for the tests that require ROS2?
Thank you!
Best wishes,
Michał -
I think I've managed to answer question (2) myself by finding this page: https://www.modalai.com/collections/development-drones . It seems that both drones use different processors for both the flight controller and compute board, so the experience with Seeker will not be transferrable to Sentinel; we won't consider that option then and we will only consider the Sentinel drone.
I would still appreciate the answer to the first question about the mainline code support/testing.
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@Michał-Barciś With Sentinel PX4 runs directly on the VOXL2, not on an external flight controller board. It is a custom PX4 build tailored to the unique environment of the VOXL2 platform. It is based on 1.12. However, we are close to releasing a new version that is based on 1.14 mainline. It is still undergoing testing so we cannot recommend that our customers use it at the moment but we have been flying with it for a few months now.
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Thank you for the fast reply, everything is clear!
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Hi.
I also need to use PX4
v1.14with enabled xrce dds client enabled on VOXL 2 as soon as possible. When are you planning to release it?
Also, I need to use ROS 2humbleon VOXL 2. Do you have a Docker image for it?Thanks.
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@Eng-Abdullah-Ghazi-AlMusalami This is our 1.14 branch: https://github.com/modalai/px4-firmware/tree/voxl-dev. We have been flying with it for quite some time now but it is not complete and ready for general release. Major features still missing are Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform VIO support, collision avoidance, and M0065 support. The documentation is still being prepared. If you are comfortable getting started without those things then feel free to start playing around with it. Otherwise I would recommend waiting for our official release of it. It's about 4 weeks out at this point.
