looking for suggestions for a quadcopter model for an engineering project

T

trekie88

New Member
I am an engineering student who is working on a project to have a drone control another drone autonomously so one person could theoretically fly two drones but only have to directly control one.

I have no experience with quadcopters and am looking for suggestions on what model quadcopter to buy for the project. below are the requirements

-low cost (below $200 preferably since two quadcopters must be purchased for this project)
-GPS tracking
-Quadcopter must be able to handle extra weight (1-3lbs range)
-easy to modify (this project likely will require adding additional hardware to one of the quadcopters)

thank you in advance for all your help
 
If you can find a quad that is capable of doing what you are asking for for $200 please let me know, I'll buy a couple myself. I have a 3DR 2014 kit that I have built and modified and added on to, that would come very close to doing what you are looking for and even though this is a build I am currently in about $1500.
 
I seriously doubt that you will find an RTF or kit to meet your requirements at your price point. If you're willing to ante up more $$ and build your own, I'd suggest an Elev-8 from Parallax - my avatar is a photo of one that I built. Here is a link to the Parallax site: https://www.parallax.com/

I'm pretty sure that it can accommodate your weight, but you might want to contact their support folks - they are really helpful. Parallax has upgraded their product - I built two V2 birds and they now have a V3 version with a new flight controller and GPS. The kit costs around $500.

Before they came out with the V3 model, I modified mine to use the APM 2.6 flight controller/autopilot. I have GPS and many flight modes - Loiter, Alt Hold, RTL (Return To Launch), Circle, Auto - fly a waypoint mission autonomously; the flight modes make it easy to learn how to fly without crashing.

One one of my Elev-8's I added a two axis gimbal/GoPro Hero4 camera and video transmitter, carbon fiber rods to mount the gimbal and lipo battery, and replaced the motors with more powerful Tarot 4002 620 KV motors - the kit approach makes it easy to make such modifications.

I hope this helps - good luck with your project!
 
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