This is an update on the aerial photography copter that I’ve been working on for the past several months based on ArduPilot and BlueOS. Linked above is the joint presentation that Willian Galvani (from BlueRobotics) and I gave at the recent ArduPilot developers conference in Richmond, UK.
The slides for my presentation can be found here but here’s the gist of it:
What kind of vehicle am I trying to build?
- An aerial photography copter which records 4K video
- Real-time video
- Easy to fly, not too complicated
- 30 min flight time
- Smart battery
- Some object avoidance
- Some cloud integration (file uploads, OTA)
- Not too scary looking, not too expensive
Hardware I’ve chosen
- CubeOrange+, Here4 GPS
- CubeNode as serial<->ethernet adapter
- RPI CM4 or CM5 companion computer
- AM32 ESCs based on VimDrones design
- Quectel LTE modem or Herelink
- XF Robot Z-1 mini camera gimbal
- Hereflow optical flow
- Benewake TFS20-L (down), TF-Nova (forward)
- T-motors MN2806 400KV motors
- MAD 12" folding propellers
- Foxtech semi-solid state 6S battery 5500mAh (custom)
- VimDrones battery BMS (note yet for sale)
- 3D printed frame (ASA-CF, PA12W (nylon))
I’ve combined this all together into a custom carrier board jointly developed with Running Electronics but for those hoping to do something similar, this AP/BlueOS setup page has mostly equivalent off-the-shelf parts.
What most excites me about this vehicle is that the software is nearly completely open source from top to bottom. The “bottom” being the AM32 DroneCAN ESCs which support control, feedback and OTA over DroneCAN and the “top” being BlueOS which I’ve blogged about before. This gives us the ability to properly integrate everything into an easy-to-use and highly functional package.
On this copter we’re using BlueOS in a number of ways:
- LTE telemetry (using ZeroTier extension)
- Live streaming video
- High altitude optical flow (using camera gimbal)
- Precision landing on April tags (using camera gimbal)
- Automatic image and video upload to the cloud
- NTRIP GPS
The vehicle is not complete yet, and is not for sale (yet). We’ve still got two serious issues to resolve including GPS interference (perhaps from the USB connection between the RPI and LTE modem) and high vibration (perhaps the propellers pass too close to the frame) so I’ll provide more updates in the future.
Until then here’s a video of the vehicle flying in my garden
If you’d like to get involved there here’s some things I’m looking for:
- Any advice on the frame, hardware, etc is greatly appreciated
- If you’re a camera manufacturer, the community needs more small cameras that are ethernet enabled and ideally allow us to control the image quality and frame rate
- If you’re an autopilot manufacturer, the community needs more ethernet enabled autopilots
- if you’re a beta tester, please consider putting BlueOS on your vehicle. If you find problems please report them! If you’re a developer perhaps try writing your own BlueOS extension or enhance an existing one.
- If you’re a drone service provider, please consider adopting this hardware/software architecture so we can pool our efforts!
I very much want to thank all the people who have helped me with this vehicle including:
- Tsuyoshi Arakawa (from JapanDrones) for the frame design
- Huibean from VimDrones for the ESCs and BMS
- Willian Galvani and the BlueOS dev team
- Sanket Sharma for the Optical Flow algorithms
- Sid from CubePilot for hardware advice especially re the CubeNode
- XF Robot for providing the XF Robot Z-1 mini
- Running Electronics for the custom carrier board
- FoxTech for providing the custom semi-solid state batteries
- DroneJapan for their support and inspiration for this project
- EAMS robotics for supporting my ArduPilot software development