Greetings!
My company is involved in a NASA competition, and for the moment, my team of engineers is using a military-grade autopilot suite to operate a large quadcopter equipped with U8s. The flight performances and lack of required tuning for the AQ has impressed us and we are interested in knowing whether the AQ would be suitable for the project.
The most important requirement is the ability to control to quad autonomously via a flight computer onboard the quad. The flight computer assesses the situation based on sensor information (some of which comes from the autopilot), calculates a 4D (space and time) trajectory for the quad, and sends out a command (composed of three command parameters: heading, horizontal groundspeed or airspeed, and vertical speed) to control the quad. This setup works very well using the military-grade autopilot, which has this built-in feature. Does the AQ6 or M4 similarly feature the capability to read data from the autopilot (e.g., GPS/INS position and attitude) and send commands to the autopilot (not in the form of new/modified waypoints but rather as command parameters enabling 3D control) through RS-232, CAN, or otherwise?
Another critical requirement is the ability for the autopilot to use information from an external GPS receiver provided specifically by the organizers for the competition (to test dead-reckoning capabilities in GPS denied environments). In our current implementation, the military-grade autopilot features a ublox chip but its antenna remains disconnected. The autopilot instead receives the GPS information from the external receiver by having the flight computer parse ublox binary data and sending the GPS info to the autopilot as CAN messages. Does the AQ6 or M4 similarly feature the capability of having the internal GPS receiver disabled at all times (even when the external GPS receiver is not transmitting) and instead accepting GPS information through an external receiver via a CAN, RS-232, or other interface?
I also wanted to mentioned another useful (but not critical) feature of the autopilot we are using which is the ability to use some of the bandwidth of the telemetry link with the ground station for communication between the flight computer onboard and some other equipment on the ground (custom-programmed command and control interface; used for geospatial situational awareness, health monitoring, activation and deactivation of some of the flight computer features).
Finally, I would invite you to consider the promotional impacts of having the AQ fielded in a prestigious NASA competition. In addition to media coverage, a select few US universities, which are very active with their UAS research programs, will be competing, and the NASA folks who are currently using PixHawk could get convinced to use the AQ instead as their research platform if the right features and capabilities are in place (mainly related to modularity to provide the ability to interface any type of sensor or equipment). If anything, I hope this post is helpful in suggesting certain features professional developers would like to see...