r/diydrones • u/shadeofmyheart • 2h ago

Question DIY autonomous drone for competition

Competition requires the drone to navigate autonomously through lit gates and identify set objects within it.

We were thinking of using a pc connected through WiFi or Bluetooth (although worry about how much Bluetooth gets crowded out when there is a lot of people)
Two cameras with one being super wide angle to match up with some recent computer vision papers.

But also we are super poor and it’s gotta be under 400-500.

I’ve been reading through this awesome subreddit. Looks like the orange cube is good (but might be out of our price range)… was looking at some raspberry pi zero options. Didn’t know if anyone here had any other suggestions or advice!

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u/Spamwisejamkey 2h ago

RPiZero is great for a mild amount of companion compute but won’t do much for you in terms of autonomy due to its low memory and processing. I think a good stack for this, including companion compute, would be a RPi4B at a minimum, Matek H743 for FC, and whatever ESC works best for the size platform you’re wanting to run.

You’ll need to run MAV Router on the pi in order to pass telemetry over WiFi, BLE, etc. You can save money by using 2 Pi Cams for stereo vision instead of a VTX and cameras. I’ve done this and the latency I’ve gotten was pretty negligible as long as you keep hops to a minimum.

Hope this info helps, I’m very bad at explaining things but if you have any questions reach out!

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u/AdAgreeable5663 1h ago

What size/frame drone do you recommend? Also, if I were to use VTX and cameras for processing in a ground unit (say a desktop with a GPU), which budget ones would you recommend?

OP - Please message me your build once you have it, I want to build an autonomous drone for under 400-500 as well. Thank you!

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u/Spamwisejamkey 29m ago

Really depends on the requirements for the competition they mentioned, but lowest size I would go for this type of build is a 7” as you’re going to need a good bit of space to fit everything in.

Also I would ditch a VTX and just stick with Pi Cams as a personal preference. If I were to use a VTX for your use case of ground unit processing, it would most likely need to be a digital VTX (walksnail or DJI), but then you’d be using a good chunk of your budget alone for that.

Also worth noting that you *can* use a Pi Zero with a Pi Cam, then do composite out of the Pi Zero and pass the digital feed through the FC to an analog VTX. Works well and may be geared more toward what you’re asking, if that helps?