Hardware Design

Bold Design.
Extravagant Sensor Suite.

With 6 RGB fisheye, and 2 Flir thermal cameras, Phoenix. Sees. Everything.

Powered by Nvidia AGX Orin.

Seamlessly running our autonomy stack making Phoenix More Intelligent.

Capable of Thermal Vision

Performs in Smoke, low Visibility conditions, making Phoenix More Resilient.

Protected by 3D printed cages.

A carbon fiber frame, with cage protection of on-board compute, making Phoenix More Rugged.

Implementation Details

The aerial hardware platform includes the following components:

  • Base-frame
  • 4 x (motors)
  • 4 x (propellers)
  • 6 x RGB Fisheye Cameras (specific)
  • 2 x Thermal Cameras (specific)
  • Nvidia AGX Orin
  • Voltage Regulator
  • 6 x RGB Camera mounts
  • 2 x Thermal Camera mounts
  • Time-sync cable

Aerial Platform Overview


Ground Control Station

A GCS would display meaningful map of the route taken by the drone. The map would contain information about the path taken (from odometry), and the fire hotspots with markers including the intensity of the fire.

Parts for the GCS have been ordered and shown in the Budget-Part List page.

Orin-FCU Communication

Robust and reliable communications between the companion Mission Computer and the FCU is paramount for augmenting advanced functionality like vision-based state estimation, Autonomy etc.

This communication is achieved through a UART link between the two, with MAVLINK as the data transport protocol. MAVROS handles the ROS-MAVLINK conversions for us. On the PX4-side the mavlink_receiver module parses the incoming MAVLINK stream and publishes appropriate uORB topics for other modules.

Communications Overview