Ardupilot v PX4

šŸ§Ŗ Flight Testing & Log Analysis
1

Hello everyone and thank you for reading.

So the age old question. Is there any valid reason to choose PX4 over Ardupilot?

2

Ardipilot is licened under GPL, making it extremely hard to use in commercial ventures. Any changes you make must be open-sourced and provided to the public.

3

ArduPilot is GPLV3, but the GPL does not require changes to be made public. It requires the source to be made available to those you distribute binaries to. A nuanced but important difference. You can also add features via onboard Lua scripting or companion computer, that are outside the GPLv3 boundary. Itā€™s a similar situation as Linux with Ubuntu, Redhat etc - the kernel is gpl, but what licensing applies to apps/features you create outside that is up to you.

4

Yes, what I meant by changes - is changes to the source code. My experience with ā€œ$Big Corporateā€ is that all use of GPLed code require A LOT more scrutiny.

1 Like
5

I am talking more along the lines of how PX4 flies vs Ardupilot. Would there be technical advantages to PX4 over Ardupilot. So I have a Durand for example that I am planning to put on either a VTOL or a Quadcopter. Which flies better

6

Especially GPL V3. Itā€™s essentially banned by most large tech companies because of fears of accidental license contamination of their own software. Smaller companies may be willing to take the risk, but larger tech companies generally wonā€™t adopt any platform that they intend to develop on if it is GPL v3.

(note that Linux is GPL v2, which is not as bad)

7

This coin has two sides. If your hobbyst or gsoc student you donā€™t want to contribute new features that some company will take for free, pack in marketing and sell. Of course in the case of PX4 afaik itā€™s quite fair, because most of the development is done and ā€˜capitalizeā€™ by the same people. IMO PX4 will converge to a linux case providing just a stable core.

8

I am just interested in the technical differences between the to flight stacks. So assume you have 470 quadcopter what flight stack do you use and why. Forget about licences. I am just talking about Technical differences. IE Ardupilot has Autotune and PX4 does not.

9

Flight throuh waypoint without stopping in multirotor mode

10

@Webillo can you explain a bit?

11

With Ardupilot experience, I tried PX4 time ago on a quadcopter. It flew vary well, but on missions it stopped at every waypoint even with waypoints in a straight line, and other people reported this with no solution at that time.

About mission files, in Ardupilot each waypoint occupies one line, but in PX4 initially it occupies several lines, so they are more difficult to manipulate with an editor (copy/paste with waypoints calculated on a spreadsheet).

I also found QGC less powerful than MP, so I used MP for PX4.

At the end, I flashed Ardupilot again, but may be I try PX4 again in the future.