Raspberry Pi 4 assisted autopilot for fixed wing aircraft
Hello there,
this idea came to my mind recently. I am building a large scale autonomous fixed wing drone and wanted to implement some kind of autopilot. My first thought went to the arduino, because of its real-time computing, but not far into development it turned out no to have enough juice. I am a bit scared of solely using a computer with OS as the main flight computer tho, since I experienced some weird hickups with the Pi before, and this would be a large security risk. Like if the Pi hangs while executing a simple curve or worse an obstacle avoidance maneuver, its basically over.
My question here is, would it be feasible to implement a hybrid approach, where the arduino handles following basic flight profiles set by the pi. So the autopilot has to work a bit different by generating a profile for the next few seconds to have a buffer for the arduino. Does this approach even make sense? What do you think? Are there better (?) alternatives to this?
TYIA for you opinions
(Disclaimer: I am aware of LOS flight restrictions in my country, have a active license and agreements with local farmers to allow me to develop this legally)
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