**3. Drone localization**

*Service Robotics*

**42**

**Figure 4.** *Drone prototype.*

**Figure 3.**

flying applications.

[16] middleware with a 50 Hz refresh rate.

*Enhanced power distribution board (left) and i7-minicomputer (right).*

the buck converter on the underside of the main frame. This 90 W computing unit allows for online computations on demanding tasks such as the visual object tracking methods of Section 4, as well as the easy development of autonomous

On the software side, the ArduCopter flight stack [15] was selected to run on the FCU. The pose estimation is carried through a sophisticated Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) at 400 Hz. The Intel NUC companion computer is serially connected to the FCU at a baud rate of 1 Mbps and the communication packages are following the MAVlink protocol. The NUC's operating system was Ubuntu Linux 16.04 and all applications are developed through the Robot Operating System (ROS) and MAVROS

The developed drone without any payload can be visualized in **Figure 4**.
