Dr Matt Bennett, who undertook his PhD at the Southampton NOC, has developed a low cost autopilot system which is now being commercialised through a spin-out company, SkyCircuits.
This sophisticated system has been developed to meet a gap in the market. Very low cost systems are available but tend to be either low performance or un-reliable. Military derived systems tend to be extremely expensive.
The SkyCircuits system has the following features:
- Flexible Input voltage 3 - 7 V, can be run off same battery as servos
- Very Low power consumption (draws 220 mA at 5V (1.1 W) (includes GPS))
- Exceptionally low Weight: 80 g
- Dimensions: 2.5 x 3.5 x 1.5 inches (approximately a pack of cards)
- Operational temperature: -40 to +70 °C
- Built-in GPS and RF communications with external aerial connections
- Standard RF module 2.4 GHz with 750 m range (beyond legal visual range), longer-range modules available and can be rapidly swapped by hand
- USB support for power and/or communications
- Very fast Aircraft state estimation at 50 Hz
- Uses high performance quaternion-based extended Kalman filter
Dr Bennett continues to support the DECODE research project.
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