- Q: Can I buy one of these?
- No
- Q: Should I use wasp?
Probbably not. I suggest you use either paparazzi or pixhawk instead. Those projects are better supported, and in many ways more capable than wasp.
If you are looking for an easy, cheap, capable hobbyist/research quadrotor, use Mikrokopter. If you are looking for a professional or advanced research quadrotor, use an asctec.
- Q: Why did you create wasp?
That is a moderately long story. I needed something that I understood top-to-bottom for my PhD. At that time (2008), paparazzi was the best-in-class, and I was fortunate to help design and build the first booz2 quadrotors. When I returned from France, I needed a slower moving target to base my PhD work on, so I forked the paparazzi code and continued to work on it.
In 2009/10 I worked on the early pixhawk system at ETH. The original onboard code was an amalgamation of wasp and paparazzi, the comms protocol design was from wasp. Once I returned from ETH I could no-longer access pixhawk hardware so persisted in using wasp. In the recent years pixhawk has advanced tremendously in capability; the comms protocol has become more standardised (and is now known as mavlink).
Pixhawk is a great project with a focus on visual control. It is well supported at ETH, both financially and enthusiastically. This is more support than I could ever muster at University of Canterbury, and one of the golden rules of open-source software is to go to the active and supported project!