Pixhawk FAQ

PIXHAWK

FAQ

We have collected the most obvious questions about this project. Please feel free to contact [ http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/wiki/team/contact ] us if questions remain.

General Questions

Who is running this project?

The PIXHAWK Team [ http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/wiki/team/start ] consist of graduate students of ETH Zurich [ http://www.ethz.ch/ ]. Most of them are from the department of computer science [ http://www.inf.ethz.ch/ ], but as interdisciplinary project students from other departments, like electrical or mechanical engineering, are involved.

Who is leading this project?

The project is led by the Computer Vision and Geometry Group [ http://www.cvg.ethz.ch/ ] at ETH Zurich [ http://www.ethz.ch/ ].

What are the goals of this project?

Our long-term goal is to enable the fully autonomous operation of micro air vehicles (MAV [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_air_vehicle ]). The intermediate goal is to successfully compete in the MAV competitions.

What is your scientific focus?

Our focus is to do realtime computer vision [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision ] on a very tiny hardware platform. Efficiency and robustness are the most important properties of our approach.

Technical Questions

How expensive is your prototype?

As this is work in progress, we cannot estimate the total system costs (per helicopter) correctly. However it is likely that it will stay below SFr 1000 (≈US $1000).

Will you make your work available as open source?

We currently plan to release as many parts of our implementation as possible under the terms of an open source license [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license ]. Commercial use might be prohibited, but the released parts will be definitely free for academic and personal use. It is likely that this release will be after the competitions, around june 2009.

Can you tell me how you did xx?

We would be happy to help other people with their research prototypes or even other MAV [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_air_vehicle ] teams.

Last modified: 2008/10/12 17:17 by maq