Is Starling 2 Max suitable for GPS-denied vertical surface inspection research?

[軟體系碩士班管理組王奕晨]

Hi everyone,

I am looking to acquire a development platform for my research project: "Autonomous Navigation and Inspection of Vertical Surfaces in GPS-denied Environments."

I am considering the Starling 2 Max, but I would like to confirm if it fits my specific technical requirements. My use case involves the drone flying close to building facades or walls without GNSS, performing visual inspection, and potentially maintaining a fixed distance from the surface.

I plan to mount additional sensors for detailed inspection, specifically a high-resolution camera (for crack analysis) and a forward-facing distance sensor (LiDAR or ToF).

Hardware: Does the Starling 2 Max frame and VOXL 2 interface support adding these external sensors easily (e.g., via available MIPI or USB ports)?

Compute: With these additional data streams, does the VOXL 2 have enough remaining compute power to run the VIO flight stack AND a real-time object detection model (e.g., YOLOv8) simultaneously without performance degradation?

Any advice or recommended configurations for this specific use case would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!