Gathering Navigation Data without Autopilot

Pixhawk
1

Hi everyone,
We are working on a research article and we want to gather navigation data from a drone while it flies.

Requirements:

  • Gathering navigation data from a physical interface, most preferably UART, SPI or CAN.
  • Timestamps of the gathered data.

We have a board that will timestamps the navigation data of the drone and some other data that we are interested in. Then it will send the unified data to ground over Wifi.

We have 2 options:

  1. Gathering the drone’s navigation data directly from drone. This option may be too expensive for us since drones with that capability are unique.
  2. We can deploy a pixhawk board on a regular drone and use the pixhawk not for controlling the drone but just for collecting the navigation data over a serial interface. We will already be controlling the drone from our ground control unit. We expect the pixhawk to collect the data from its sensor interfaces, generate the navigation data and send it over a serial interface.
    Gathering the raw sensor datas seperately is not preferable but considerable.

We are unfamiliar with PixHawk. Our question is that:
How can we easily deploy a PixHawk flight controller in this way?
Is this even possible?
If possible, are there any example projects that can serve our purpose?

Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks.

2

Any comments will be appreciated.

3

Hello Adem,
You could refer to our docs and find the setups which may work for you: