"Assistance Needed: Queries Regarding VOXL 2 for Quadcopter Development - Indoor inspection drone"

[Tamilselvan]

Greetings,

I am currently working on building a quadcopter tailored for warehouse inspection applications. For this purpose, I have chosen Modal AI's VOXL 2, primarily for its VIO and VOA features. While I have reviewed the documentation thoroughly, I still have a few unresolved questions. I have compiled these queries and would greatly appreciate it if someone could assist me in addressing them.

1. Can "VOXL ESC FPV 4-in-1 with Built-in Power Module (MDK-M0138)" be used with Non FPV motors such as "T- Motor - MN4004 Antigravity Type 4-6S UAV Motor KV300"?

2. What is the suggested VOXL 2 Camera configuration for having a 360° obstacle avoidance and VIO? How to decide on imaging sensors, whether it is stereo, tracking, or/and TOF? And how to decide how many are required and where to position them? What is a Tracking camera used for?

3. How to select how many thermal cameras are required and their position for the drone which requires to operate in no light conditions. Can TOF sensors be used for no light indoor space navigation?

4. What are some special cases when external flight controllers have to be integrated with VOXL 2? What is the limiting factor here?

5. Are there any expansion boards available to increase the number of camera connections?

6. In Wi-Fi based data transmission, can both UAV telemetry and video data be transmitted? using "Alfa Network AWUS036EACS 802.11ac AC600 Wi-Fi Wireless Network Adapter". What modules are used to get UAV telemetry wirelessly?

7. is there any other thermal can support other than flir boson. if it supports suggest the model

[Eric Katzfey]

@Tamilselvan External flight controllers need to have a standard UART interface and Mavlink interface to use our VOXL SDK. Of course, the VOXL 2 is a development platform so you can change it as needed for many other use cases. In terms of WiFi, that is just an IP based network interface so yes, Mavlink based telemetry and RTSP video streaming both go over it.

[Tamilselvan]

@Eric-Katzfey Thank you for the reply.

[Tamilselvan]

@Tamilselvan For the previously mentioned use case of "having a 360° obstacle avoidance and VIO" for indoor inspection drone, can the following camera configuration be used?
: - One "Image Sensor 4k High-resolution, Low-light Sensor for VOXL (Starvis IMX412 w/ micro-coax & M12-style Lens) (MSU-M0161)" in the front side for video streaming & recording and QR code identification.

&

Five PMD TOF sensors on the front, back, left, right and top sides for SLAM & obstacle avoidance.

[Eric Katzfey]

@Tamilselvan we currently support only one PMD TOF sensor. due to power and connector requirements.

[Alex Kushleyev]

@Tamilselvan ,

Please review the following thread : https://forum.modalai.com/topic/4125/indoor-navigation-using-4-depth-sensors

We currently support only one PMD TOF V2 sensor per VOXL2, however with M0172 adapter (not released yet), it may be possible to connect up to 3 PMD TOF sensors, but the system may be power limited and will need to be thoroughly tested by us before recommending this configuration.

I will investigate how soon we could test this.

Alex

[Alex Kushleyev]

@Tamilselvan , I checked with the team and we do have the M0172 available (internally for now). We have not yet tested multiple TOF V2 sensors with that adapter. It will probably be a few weeks before we get to try it.

Alex

[Tamilselvan]

@Alex-Kushleyev Thank you for the reply

Currently we are buying Voxl2 flight deck from you, I will be integrating in my drone after integrating what I need to do how to make it fly autonomously can you guide that how sdk works and how 3d map will be created how we need to plan a machine in the sdk