I would like to to build a drone for an indoor 100% autonomous drone competition. I will need to be able to program the drone in something like C/C++/Python in order to take in sensor input from color tracking cameras, various distance sensors, IR detectors etc. Can the ArduCopter/Pixhawk accomplish this?
Can I attach a secondary computer such as a Jetson Nano/RPi/Arduino that takes in all the input. processes it and figures out which way to go and then passes that instruction to the PixHawk - Example, the color tracking camera is looking for an orange object, it sees it and determines the drone needs to raise up, can the secondary computer then send a command to the PixHawk to got up etc…
Im an experienced small robot builder and programmer Ive just new to programming drones. Ive flew a bunch and even have a small programmable drone (DJI Tello EDU) but it just cant do what I need.
Yes - that’s the most common way to do it. These are called “companion computers” and there’s a section in the Wiki explaining how to set the up with ArduPilot: Companion Computers — Dev documentation