

A technical comparison of open source drone autopilots (2012) - danshapiro
http://online.qmags.com/RAM0912?pg=21&mode=2#pg35&mode2

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sjtrny
Because it's a few years old it's missing the two big guns in acro flight:
clean flight and base flight (and the drama between the two camps). Also some
of the information about the PID controllers is a likely out of date and with
some firmware there are actually multiple PID controllers to choose from.

But apart from that most of the information is quite good as a historic
reference.

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Animats
Good subject, but the article is 3 years old in a fast moving field, and
displayed in a painful e-book program. Is there a better article available?

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fit2rule
This is really not "a book", but more a set of summaries of robotic subjects
from a diverse group of technologists working in the field.

Each article contains extraordinary insight and is thus a valuable thing to
read, especially if you are _new to the subject_.. as students and
industrialists alike.

Even if its 'only of 3 years ago', actually the subject of software and
robotics is decades old and has had its ebbs and waves of 'hot new idea of
today' such that the subject is very dense.

In my opinion, robotics and autonomous systems is a subject now moderately
impervious to the "not the new new" syndrome suffered by technologies, young
and old. 3 years is just a blip.

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cbd1984
Except CPU designs from three years ago are no longer considered current, and
robots are built around CPUs (that is, if it lacks a CPU, it is not a robot),
so three years is long enough to obsolete a vital component.

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exDM69
All of these are running on micro controller or similar embedded platforms
that are are significantly slower to change than consumer CPUs. Calling them
obsolete is not a realistic stance to take. Some of the hardware has changed
over the years, but the changes have been mostly to the sensors used and other
peripherals, they are still using the same CPUs they did a few years ago and
they're definitely not obsolete.

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matheweis
> they are still using the same CPUs they did a few years ago

Not true; at the writing of the article, the Pixhawk board was using the
LPC2148, and today it uses the STM32F427... who knows what else has been
changed over the years as well?

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exDM69
Yeah, that's possible... I didn't go through all of them, but some had
remained essentially the same, e.g. the OpenPilot board had changed some
sensors but is still using the same CPU as far as I can tell.

But that's really besides the point, the CPUs they were using have not really
turned obsolete like GP said. Even the STM32 F4 series you mention was
released in 2011, before this article was written. And that's the latest
generation of the STM32 series, so it hasn't gone obsolete.

