Hardware, Components, and Dev Kits

This is an list of development platforms for aerial robotics. Please start a pull request if you'd like to update these.

Standard Commercial Research Platforms

These are platforms that are currently commercially available for anybody to buy for their research.

Copters

Flapping wing

Industrial Platforms

Inhouse-developed platforms

These are platforms that are standard within a lab or department, with information of what it contains provided with perhaps build instructions.,

Discontinued Platforms

Components

Many of the UAVs are usually built by hand and composed of different components. This usually consists of a drone frame, flight controller boards, companion computers and of course motors, batteries and ESCs.

Drone Frames

Many drone frames are usually built from carbon fiber and custom-made for application or research. There are some frames that are provided that will provide some base: - DJI Flame wheel ARF kit F550, F450, F330 - Momentum Drones DEV-7

Flight controllers

Companion Computers

For the drones that can carry it, the companion computers are important since they can do additional computations that the flight controller can not easily do. As these are capable of running some form of Linux, these can handle for instance computer vision with OpenCV or run nodes with ROS. Some companion computers also integrate flight control (RTOS) hardware in the same package

Carrier boards

Several vendors have developed carrier boards that can expose input/output ports of companion computers mentioned above which are packaged in a System-on-Module (SoM) form factor and also offer a standard interface for plugging in popular flight controllers/their own FCs.

Depth Cameras

Monocular Cameras

  • Raspberry PI Cameras Compatible with RPI. IMX219 and IMX477 based cameras compatible with Jetson Xavier, NX, Nano, Orin series (other models may require device tree overlays or source changes).
  • Google Coral Camera Compatible with NXP NAVQPLUS

TOF Cameras

Reference Bill of Materials

Holybro S500v2

The Holybro S500v2 is a popular, relatively low-cost quadcopter. This is a list of the parts used with details of battery, motors, ESCs, and propellers with reference links to guide custom builds.

S.No Part Name Part category Description Price (USD) Qty Total Cost (USD) Official/Reference Link
1 Holybro S500 frame Frame With landing gear, 385x385mm 42 1 42 https://holybro.com/collections/s500/products/s500-v2-kit?variant=42724497391805
2 Holybro Pixhawk 6C + GPS + Power module FC + GPS + Power module PM02 power module, M9N GPS 290 1 290 https://holybro.com/products/pixhawk-6c?variant=43005243785405
3 Holybro 2216 920KV CW Motor 19x19 mounting clockwise rotation 20 2 40 https://holybro.com/products/spare-parts-s500-v2-kit?variant=41591094608061
4 Holybro 2216 920KV CCW Motor 19x19 mounting counter-clockwise rotation 20 2 40 https://holybro.com/products/spare-parts-s500-v2-kit?variant=41591094640829
5 BLHeli S 20A ESC ESC Electronic Speed Controller to drive motors 14 4 56 https://holybro.com/products/spare-parts-s500-v2-kit?variant=41591094706365
6 1045 propellers Props 10x4.5" kit of 2 pairs 12 1 12 https://holybro.com/products/spare-parts-s500-v2-kit?variant=41591094313149
7 Radiomaster R81 receiver Radio receiver Used for manually flying drone Line of Sight/testing* 18 1 18 https://holybro.com/products/radiomaster-r81-receiver
8 Holybro SiK telemetry radio v3 Telemetry link radio 500mW, 433MHz variant, pair of transmitter + receiver** 63 1 63 https://holybro.com/products/sik-telemetry-radio-v3?variant=42801817485501
9 Tattu 5200mAh 4S Battery 4S1P XT60 plug 35C 63 1 63 https://genstattu.com/tattu-5200mah-14-8v-35c-4s1p-lipo-battery-pack-with-xt60-plug.html
Grand Total 624

Notes:

*It can be used with Radiomaster Multiprotocol (4 in 1) or CC2500 based Radio Controller like FrSky Taranis X9D or similar
**Used for connecting to ground control station, 915MHz variant also available

Useful tool for this page: https://tabletomarkdown.com/convert-spreadsheet-to-markdown/