BeaglePilot

Dear BeagleBoard community:

I’m sharing an idea that a group of students is trying to push forward: BeaglePilot.

ArduPilot is an outstanding piece of software designed by a big community to run in microcontrollers . The effort put in this project is indeed amazing and as far as i understand it’s a great source of inspiration. First steps have been taken to port ArduPilot to the BeagleBone. Although a great work, things can always be improved and as students I believe we can learn quite a lot though the path of designing something ourselves.

The idea behind BeaglePilot is to create an autopilot for linux-based computers (microprocessors) taking the BeagleBone as a starting point. Since the initial approaches are different I personally believe that it makes sense to start BeaglePilot trying to avoid reinventing the wheel, thereby reusing as much code as possible from ArduPilot. The things i would like to see in BeaglePilot are the following:

  • Linux-based autopilot (original kernel, RT-patch and Xenomai can be explored)
  • Well documented code (e.g. doxygen) and easy to hack (currently ArduPilot is quite a big project and hack it is not so straightforward. At least it doesn’t look for a student like myself but if some of the experienced coders out there think so i’d be glad to get some directions about where to start).
  • ROS integrated
    We’d love to hear the opinion of experience BB and BBB users about whether it’s best to contribute to ArduPilot instead of reusing their code to build BeaglePilot. Please share your ideas in the drones-discuss debate.

Thanks in advance.