ICARUS

Overview

ICARUS was FRoST’s first aerial platform — an autonomous drone built to complement the team’s ground-based rovers. Its mission: reach terrain features a rover cannot, survey areas of interest from the air, and relay visual data back to the operations team to guide decision-making during competition. By performing aerial surveys while the rover traverses the Mars Yard, it identifies promising sampling locations and provides multi-point localization support.

Development

The ICARUS project kicked off in early 2024, with the team evaluating airframe options, flight controller architectures, and communication systems that could integrate with FRoST’s existing ground station infrastructure. The custom quadcopter design stayed under a total weight of 2.29 kg, safely below competition thresholds.

To ensure stability and reliability, development followed a simulation-first approach. This leveraged PX4 software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop capabilities alongside custom automation modules compiled directly into C-libraries from MATLAB environments. Advanced operations, including trajectory planning and target localization, were fully verified in simulation environments before deployment.

The drone made its competition debut alongside ARES at the European Rover Challenge 2024 in Krakow, Poland — the first time FRoST fielded an aerial system at an international event. The knowledge gained from ICARUS — airframe design, autonomy architecture, sensor integration, and the lessons of its first competition appearance — fed directly into the development of its successor, DAEDALUS.