Research Crossroads - I choose Pixhawk

So I've had to think hard about which route I wanted to take for my research. On one hand, I could go full customized process with every bit of code written by yours truly (including the the hardware design, soldering, testing and integration). This will mean a serious divergence from the primary focus of my research but the high risk could yield immense entrepreneurial satisfaction. I calculated that this route would probably add another 6 months to PhD research.

On the other hand, as I've posted before, buy an off-the-shelf flight controller, focus on integrating the peripherals, up-ramp knowledge on the tested code suite and start working on integrating my research algorithms almost immediately. This route is substantially more expensive (Initial capital), but you then have a large community of users to inquire from. I've estimated about 2 month of extra work towards my PhD research.

So the decision is now obvious. I've chosen to buy the Pixhawk 2.4.8 first. Start STIL (Software-In-The-Loop) and then HITL (Hardware-In-The-Loop) to begin to understand the code structure. In some way, I'm quite excited about diving straight integrating the flight controller on my heli (once I buy it).

So a major milestone has been decided today. I shall carry on developing the machine learning algorithms that should just intergrate into the Pixhawk software suite.

Aluta Continua!

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