Lowering Barriers to Entry for Fully-Integrated Custom Payloads on a DJI Matrice

TL;DR

This paper provides practical guidelines and a ready-to-use setup for integrating a Raspberry Pi 5 into a DJI Matrice 350, enabling custom payload development that is affordable, expandable, and easy to implement for researchers.

Contribution

It introduces a cost-effective, modular approach for attaching and controlling custom computational payloads on a DJI drone, including detailed setup instructions and solutions to integration challenges.

Findings

Successfully integrated Raspberry Pi 5 with DJI Matrice 350

Payload can control drone and access sensors in real time

Provides open-source setup scripts and configuration

Abstract

Consumer-grade drones have become effective multimedia collection tools, spring-boarded by rapid development in embedded CPUs, GPUs, and cameras. They are best known for their ability to cheaply collect high-quality aerial video, 3D terrain scans, infrared imagery, etc., with respect to manned aircraft. However, users can also create and attach custom sensors, actuators, or computers, so the drone can collect different data, generate composite data, or interact intelligently with its environment, e.g., autonomously changing behavior to land in a safe way, or choosing further data collection sites. Unfortunately, developing custom payloads is prohibitively difficult for many researchers outside of engineering. We provide guidelines for how to create a sophisticated computational payload that integrates a Raspberry Pi 5 into a DJI Matrice 350. The payload fits into the Matrice's case like a typical DJI payload (but is much cheaper), is easy to build and expand (3D-printed), uses the drone's power and telemetry, can control the drone and its other payloads, can access the drone's sensors and camera feeds, and can process video and stream it to the operator via the controller in real time. We describe the difficulties and proprietary quirks we encountered, how we worked through them, and provide setup scripts and a known-working configuration for others to use.