DAEDALUS

A New Perspective

DAEDALUS — Deployable Aerial Exploration Drone for Autonomous Low-altitude Utility Scouting — is FRoST’s second-generation aerial platform and the evolved successor to ICARUS. It takes everything the team learned developing and deploying ICARUS and channels it into a purpose-built drone designed specifically for the demands of the European Rover Challenge.

DAEDALUS scouts promising sampling locations, capturing imagery of the terrain, detecting targets with onboard computer vision, and providing the kind of situational awareness that no ground-based sensor suite can fully replicate.

Built to Fly Light

At just 1.7 kg, DAEDALUS is compact, agile, and well within the ERC’s 5 kg weight limit. The airframe is a structural redesign from ICARUS: a 3D-printed carbon-tube-reinforced frame that keeps weight low without sacrificing rigidity. Ten-inch propellers strike the balance between hover efficiency and manoeuvrability for the low-altitude work the ERC drone tasks demand.

At the core of the drone’s avionics is the Pixhawk PX4 flight controller, a battle-tested platform that handles flight dynamics, sensor fusion, and failsafe logic entirely in hardware. An onboard Raspberry Pi 5 acts as the mission computer, running real-time image processing and the custom autonomy stack. An LED array built into the airframe provides status indication and improves visibility during low-light operations.

Intelligent Positioning

DAEDALUS knows exactly where it is at all times. The drone carries a modular positioning suite: standard GPS for baseline navigation, an RTK-GNSS receiver for centimetre-level accuracy when precision matters, and an Optical Flow sensor for stable hovering close to the ground where satellite signals alone are insufficient. These sources are fused through the PX4 sensor pipeline to produce reliable position estimates across the range of conditions encountered at competition.

Intelligence in the Air

DAEDALUS doesn’t just fly — it understands what it sees. The autonomy stack is built on ROS2 and communicates with the PX4 flight controller via MAVLink. A Harel-type state machine manages mission modes, allowing the drone to transition cleanly between manual flight, autonomous sector coverage, and emergency procedures without operator intervention.

Complex capabilities — trajectory planning, ArUco marker detection for target identification and precision landing, object detection along flight paths — are prototyped in MATLAB and then integrated into the live ROS2 framework once validated in simulation. The complete system is tested in Gazebo before any hardware flights, ensuring behaviour is confirmed before deployment.

During the ERC droning task, DAEDALUS autonomously navigates its designated sector, captures imagery, and detects probe objects — all while transmitting only telemetry to the ground station. Camera streams are suppressed during autonomous operation, as required by competition rules.

Safety First

A drone flying above an active competition area demands rigorous safeguards. DAEDALUS operates under a strict geo-fence enforced at the flight controller level, preventing any trajectory outside the designated zone. The PX4 safety system continuously monitors battery charge, sensor health, and communication link quality. If any parameter falls outside safe bounds — or if the operator triggers an emergency shutdown — the drone initiates an automatic landing sequence within five seconds, regardless of what the autonomy stack is doing.

The manual RC remote provides a direct hardware override that bypasses all software layers entirely. Activating it immediately halts any autonomous navigation and returns full control to the pilot. This override remains active throughout every flight, at every mission phase.