Introduction

Welcome to the introduction. The purpose of this page is to clarify the scope of this documentation, as well as to serve as a starting point to start working with EOLab Drones.

This documentation is designed for three types of readers/users, and makes a strong assumption that everyone knows the basics of drones:

• Operators/Pilots: This user is primarily interested in performing manually operated missions, so the Common Operational Manual section covers all the information necessary for an operator/pilot to use our self-built drones.
• Developers (application layer): This user is interested in performing assisted or autonomous missions with our drones, so the Developers section provides relevant resources to develop autonomous applications.
• Maintainers: User in charge of maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure for the previous users as well as the documentation.

What if you are not yet familiar with the basics of drones? in that case you can visit the external link Basic concepts - PX4 Docs. For now there are no intentions to include educational material to start from zero on drones as this only increases the overhead of the documentation.

The Cores

The following section is purely informative, and is intended to point out the projects that are at the core of our drones.

Operators/Pilots, Developers, and Maintainers should each be familiar with the following projects, with the expected depth of knowledge varying by the type of reader/user you are.

Hardware core: Pixhawk is defined as an open hardware standard, “Pixhawk open standards provide readily available hardware specifications and guidelines for drone systems development.” In all of our self-built drones, the flight controller is either fully Pixhawk compliant—for example, the Holybro Pixhawk v6c in Pegasus—or compatible with Pixhawk but not fully compliant. An example of the latter is Protoflyer, which uses the “Cube Black by Hex” flight controller. This controller does not follow the "Pixhawk Autopilot Bus (PAB) Standard (DS-010)", making it vendor-locked to “The Cube” family produced by Hex.

Software core: PX4, an open-source autopilot. Given the foundation of an open hardware standard, Pixhawk, the two popular options in this space are PX4 and ArduPilot. We have an opinionated inclination toward PX4 (see Autopilots for details); therefore, all of our self-built drones run PX4. However, we truly acknowledge and admire the ArduPilot ecosystem.

Application core, for developers and maintainers: ROS, the Robot Operating System. ROS provides the application-layer framework used to build, integrate, and operate higher-level robotics software around the drone. While PX4 is responsible for low-level flight control, stabilization, and vehicle-specific behavior, ROS is used for application-level capabilities such as autonomy, perception, simulation and interaction with external systems. Developers and maintainers working on this layer should be fluent in the ROS ecosystem.