The world's smallest autopilot

The development team at the Delft Technical University has created the world's smallest autopilot . It is designed for microcopters or helicopters and has dimensions of only 2x2 centimeters. Board weight is 2.8 grams. Manages the work of the autopilot 72-MHz ARM Cortex M3 MCU microcontroller with 16 kB of RAM and 512 kB of flash memory. Despite the tiny size, on board there is a serious set of navigation equipment - accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer and GPS.

The autopilot, called the Lisa / S, is part of a large project to create affordable Paparazzi unmanned vehicles. All software and hardware in this project - Open Source. Authors want small flying robots to become as common and everyday as a smartphone. Detailed specifications of the hardware and all the software are published on the project wiki and in the repositories on GitHub. The finished board is sold under the brand name 1 bit squared .

Demonstration of the flight of a microcopter and a helicopter under the control of Lisa / S.
A lighter and smaller autopilot allows the quadcopter to stay in the air longer or carry more payloads, which is very important for practical use. The head of the Delta University Microdynamics Laboratory, Mark Remes, believes that pocket-sized quadcopters with a video camera may in the near future be part of the standard equipment of firefighters and rescue workers, as well as be widely used in industry and agriculture for surveying equipment and fields.