BeagleBone Black for X8-VB Quadcopter Attitude Control

Nowadays, people are living in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), where small microcontrollers or microprocessors are used to read sensors and interact with actuators through the internet. There are a lot of possible approaches, but boards like Arduino, Raspberry pi, BeagleBone Black (and others), can really simplify the interaction between the controllers, sensors and the actuators, so it is important to understand its advantages and disadvantages when it comes to processing speed, parallel processing, expansibility and versatility. This paper will be focused on the BeagleBone Black, the less popular of the microcontrollers/microprocessors mentioned before and therefore, the one with less web support and updated documentation. Its architecture will be explained in order to understand the advantages of the specifications of the BeagleBone Black, namely the ARM Cortex processor and its Programmable Realtime Unit (PRU). The Attitude Controller for the X8-VB Quadcopter is implemented and compared with its Arduino Due version to validate the overall performance improvement of this transition from the Arduino Due to the BeagleBone Black.