I believe this system was constructed in 2008/2009, which is impressive given the nascent state of open-source drones at the time.<p>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.<p>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!
If you are interested in this, I strongly encourage you to watch Andrew Tridgell's talk from linux.conf.au 2012: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML__e_ZcWiQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML__e_ZcWiQ</a>. It was close to my favourite talk at that conference.<p>From the youtube video: "This talk is all about the technology and techniques that we have developed for building an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that can search for and find a lost bushwalker in outback Australia"<p>Tridge is a great speaker, and discusses the nuances of this topic really well.
> Instead of the usual Kalman filtering, I've devised my own IMU sensor fusion algorithm which is super easy to visualize and doesn't require a PHD in mathematics. Further, it works as well as the complex filters you'd find in the conventional approach.<p>I wonder what evidence he has for that. It sounds awfully suspect.
Can anybody explain to me how he can legally use amateur radio bands to communicate with this drone? He is a licensed ham, but the device is neither a beacon nor a repeater (and both would need a callsign, at least where I live).
I reckon legislation will soon fall which makes these illegal unless you are law enforcement or military. If it makes either party potentially more accountable then it's going to cause problems.<p>Great piece of kit though!