Mukut Mukherjee on Medium breaks down the process of building an autonomous drone!
Thanks to science and technology, our fascination with angels have been replaced with that of autonomous drones, machines that are capable of flying by themselves.
Building autonomous drone, or even understanding them could be extremely taunting. So let’s break this down.
The first step towards the automation of our drone would be replacing the radio with an onboard computer. Speaking of onboard computers for the drone, I hope, that a Lenovo Thinkpad would not be the first thing that pops to mind. We can make good use of the Raspberry Pi here. Even an Arduino would perform in this situation, though it is not a computer, but a micro-controller. I have tried and tested both of them and the Pi, because of its greater computational power, would be best suited in this quest to make the drone autonomous. But, how does replacing the radio with the Pi help us achieve our goal? Well, with the Pi we can connect a wide range of external sensors and run different mapping, localization, and or image processing algorithms, do all the fun stuff basically. But first up, we need to mimic the radio transmitter signals that served as inputs for our flight controller.
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