I believe this system was constructed in 2008/2009, which is impressive given the nascent state of open-source drones at the time.
However, today, ArduPilot and Paparazzi are both fairly full-featured in terms of supporting ground stations, waypoints/missions, and autoland, MultiWii/PARIS is very cheap and stable for multirotors (albeit with a more limited feature set), and OpenPilot is developing rapidly. All are open-source and they all use real sensor fusion and stabilization code rather than some sort of Kalman-filter free special sauce like this guy.
It's truly amazing how far we've come in just a few years - ten years ago a small quadcopter would have been hard to imagine (due to a lack of decent micro-sized IMUs as well as a lack of easily-obtainable large high-density LiPos), five years ago a project for only the brave, talented, and well-backed, and now we can buy them as toys!
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I believe this system was constructed in 2008/2009, which is impressive given the nascent state of open-source drones at the time.
However, today, ArduPilot and Paparazzi are both fairly full-featured in terms of supporting ground stations, waypoints/missions, and autoland, MultiWii/PARIS is very cheap and stable for multirotors (albeit with a more limited feature set), and OpenPilot is developing rapidly. All are open-source and they all use real sensor fusion and stabilization code rather than some sort of Kalman-filter free special sauce like this guy.
It's truly amazing how far we've come in just a few years - ten years ago a small quadcopter would have been hard to imagine (due to a lack of decent micro-sized IMUs as well as a lack of easily-obtainable large high-density LiPos), five years ago a project for only the brave, talented, and well-backed, and now we can buy them as toys!
Pah - we had a guy doing this 70years ago with just a gyro compass and a prop shaft counter.
And he managed to hit London most of the time.
This is kind of in poor taste.
But amusing and to an extent true.