A Survey on Open-Source Flight Control Platforms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), so-called drones, have gotten a lot of attention in academic research and commercial applications due to their simple structure, ease of operations and low-cost hardware components. Flight controller, embedded electronic component, represents the core part of the drone. It aims at performing the main operations of the drone (e.g., autonomous control and navigation). There are various types of flight controllers and each of them has its own characteristics and features. This paper presents an extensive survey on the publicly available open-source flight controllers that can be used for academic research. The paper introduces the basics of UAV system with its components. The survey fully covers both hardware and software open-source flight controller platforms and compares their main features.