[mrandish]

Thanks for your interesting post. I wouldn't be surprised if you are correct, at least based on my experiences with pseudo-governmental software development. I've noticed that, as a percentage, there seem to be fewer folks who've developed the grizzled paranoia that comes from repeatedly shipping commercial software under unreasonable constraints.

As an amateur RC pilot familiar with some of the excellent RC flight control systems, it would have been a huge missed opportunity if JPL didn't invite some experienced engineers from the commercial and consumer drone community to provide input (QA folks too!). It's hard to imagine they wouldn't have gotten ample volunteers to spend a few days helping out.

I understand JPL is already designing a larger and more capable iteration. It would be cool if experienced drone flight control devs such as yourself dropped the team a note.