A series of custom quadrotors built on an S500 base kit with 3D-printed prop guards, battery housings, and camera gimbal mounts, plus a mounting platform for an onboard Jetson Nano.
Build
The frame is an S500 quadrotor kit, extended with 3D-printed parts designed and printed in-house:
- Prop guards, printed with spares on hand since they're the first thing to break
- Battery housing sized for multiple battery form factors
- A top cover and spacers for the compute stack
- A 3-axis gimbal, sized to whichever camera is mounted that flight
Payload and compute
| Component | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Jetson Nano | Onboard compute for perception/control experiments |
| Raspberry Pi + PiConnect HAT | Secondary compute and telemetry |
| RGB camera | Standard visual payload |
| Intel RealSense depth camera | Depth-aware perception experiments |
| Thermal camera | Thermal payload experiments |
| LiDAR | Ranging and mapping |
| FPV receiver | Live first-person video feed |
| GoPro | High-quality flight footage |
| WiFi base station + pole | Extended-range ground link |
Flight is managed through QGroundControl, the open-source ground control station used across the DIY and research drone community.
This is a hardware platform first: the point is having a real, flying testbed for the same perception and networking questions explored on the research side (see the UAV trajectory-generation and detection papers among these projects).