General inquiries about Starling 2 Max Outdoor GPS-denied Development Drone

[Ender]

Hi Modal AI team,

We are interesting in your Starling 2 Max Outdoor GPS-denied Development Drone. We have a few questions before purchasing it:

1. What are the specifications of the different cameras available? Thermal or RGB? Especially the tracking one.
2. We have seen that the drone comes with an PX4 integrated flight controller. We would prefer working with Ardupilot. Is it possible to use an external flight controller? Or use your flight controller with Ardupilot?
3. If yes to the response above, could you provide indications on how to do so? What would be required (changing some parameters or something similar?)
4. Our environment is very bright and therefore challenging regarding camera exposure. We are thinking of using some extra cameras compared to your initial setup. How complicate would it be to add extra cameras?

Thank you for you time,

Best regards,

[Zachary Lowell 0]

@Ender said in General inquiries about Starling 2 Max Outdoor GPS-denied Development Drone:

@Ender please fine responses below:

What are the specifications of the different cameras available? Thermal or RGB? Especially the tracking one.

You can find all specifications on the cameras in our documentation here: https://docs.modalai.com/image-sensors/

We have seen that the drone comes with an PX4 integrated flight controller. We would prefer working with Ardupilot. Is it possible to use an external flight controller? Or use your flight controller with Ardupilot?

Mainline ardupilot on the PCB is still in progress - unsure if it is mainlined yet but I believe this is still in development - as for using a external flight controller that can absolutely be done and then you can leverage the voxl2 for onboard compute capabilities - however you would be in charge of figuring out how to MOUNT it to the starling 2 max. Documentation on how one can leverage an external FCU can be found here: https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-external-flight-controller/

If yes to the response above, could you provide indications on how to do so? What would be required (changing some parameters or something similar?)

You can follow the documentation here: https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-external-flight-controller/ - NOTE: the documentation reflects usage of PX4, however you can use ardupilot as well with the same hardware and software setup as they both leverage mavlink.

Our environment is very bright and therefore challenging regarding camera exposure. We are thinking of using some extra cameras compared to your initial setup. How complicate would it be to add extra cameras?

The starling 2 max has the option of 3 tracking cameras - I am a bit unsure why you would need to add more into the mix in order to capture the exposure in the environment. I would not recommend adding more cameras in this ecosystem as three should be plenty.

Zach