Has anyone stuck a pi to a quadrocopter yet? I really, really want to make one that can chase my cat around the house.

Possibly better off just programming an ArDrone to do stuff like that – an RPi and associated power supply is quite a load to put on a quadcopter, you’re likely to need one bigger than would comfortably fly inside.

What are the advantages to using ROS over just doing robot stuff in Raspbian (where there is plenty of guidance from other people doing stuff)?

ROS would run on top of Raspbian (or whatever OS). It’s just a framework for robotics stuff, which has support for various sensors and algorithms.

So e.g. you could just take a pathplanning component off the shelf, or a sensor driver etc. Depends how complex a robot you want to make I guess! I immediately think some sort of autonomy, sensing & acting. But if you want something that just drives about the place you can do something a lot simpler!

Has anyone stuck a pi to a quadrocopter yet? I really, really want to make one that can chase my cat around the house.

I suspect you couldn’t do the vision processing fast enough on a rPi, unless it’s simple like a black cat on white carpets.

Or actually, attach IR leds to the cat’s collar, IR pass filter on a camera then it’d be dead easy…

I suspect you couldn’t do the vision processing fast enough on a rPi, unless it’s simple like a black cat on white carpets.

I hadn’t actually considered that, good point. I want to use IR or sonar to make it able to map the house first and navigate (probably vector field histograms as I think that they’re neat). The next step would be the cat recognition and following. If I could get a fast enough wireless link I could just push all the processing to my server.

There’s an RC car you can get where they’ve stripped out the gubbins and make it so that you can control it from a computer, you just send the actual control commands – the pc does all the processing etc… and the car just sends back sensor information to enable that.

You know Alan O’Donohoe? I know him (vaguely) through BCS.