Flight Control Boards 2025

#1

Hi everyone!

I’m a mechanical engineering senior looking to dive deeper into ROS and autonomous flight for a personal project. I recently took an autonomous vehicles class and worked at a drone company over the summer, but I’m new to component selection and haven’t worked directly with ROSflight before.

I was planning to use the OpenPilot CC3D Revolution that’s mentioned in the documentation, but it looks like it’s been discontinued by HobbyKing.

What flight controllers are you all currently using with ROSflight? I’m particularly interested in:

  • What specific boards/models are working well for you
  • Where you’re sourcing them from
  • Any gotchas or compatibility issues to watch out for

My goal is to build a quadcopter platform for experimenting with autonomous flight algorithms and getting hands-on experience with ROS integration. I don’t need anything too fancy - just something reliable that plays well with ROSflight.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations! Looking forward to joining the community.

#2

Hi Thomas! Welcome!

ROSflight is currently undergoing a lot of changes, in prep for the ROSflight v2.0 release that will be coming soon. I say this because it looks like you might have been referring to the v1.3 version of the documentation, which references the OpenPilot Revolution board.

To view the newest documentation, make sure you select the “git-main” version of the documentation on the website, as in the image below. This will appear as v2.0 once we release the second version.

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The documentation might also be a bit sparse in some areas–we’re working on that. However, the installation and Tutorial sections are fairly well vetted. If you find something lacking, we’d love an issue on GitHub or a question here.

Now to finally answer your question :slight_smile:. We currently support 2 hardware boards, the Pixracer Pro from 3DR/mRo (~$350), and the AeroVironment Varmint (which I don’t think is available for purchase commercially). The Pixracer Pro works well with ROSflight.

#3

I’ll also note that we’re hoping to support additional boards in the future. The ROSflight firmware is designed to separate the actual ROSflight code from the board implementation layer, making it relatively easy to support new boards and sensor packages. If you are interested in supporting a board other than the two listed, let me know and I can give you an overview!