So I'm looking to buy a drone for my internship company to find people during floods. And damn these companies suck balls.
Closed source.
You want to use API for onboard image processing?
Buy a €3500 drone
Add €1100 processor stuff
Add €850 camera
ugh.

Are you use their money or...?

@jhh2450 haha yes ofc, I'm barely getting payed myself.

@marthulu Just making sure... Some companies try to abuse an internship.

Damn, I just sold my drone... Sold it for 750, bought it for 1,500 or so.

for rescue missions in harsh conditions?
5450 € may seem much to you as an intern but this is cheap asf!
If live are at stakes you not want to cheap out. Or would you like to be rescued after a car acident by bicycle ambulance? No you want the fastest and most secure way.
For Professional drones you could easely pay 15'000€.

DJI Matrice 100 is reasonably open right... I mean, Richard Stallman would still cry, but at least it uses accessible hardware/API?

Otherwise you get into DIY territory, where you can use Dronecode/PX4 (Linux Foundation).

Yeah we need a good off-the-shelf open source drone kit, like we have with smartphones. Oh wait... 😞

For battery power fixed wing drones are absolutely beastly. Built one for a competition and it could fly for hours at quite a rate and glided like a beast. If you dont have to hover and do sweeping runs those are a good option. Plus the Pixhawk V2 is a an amazing autopilot and super extendable!

If you can figure out how the parts you want for your drone and assemble it yourself, you will actually spend far less for a much higher quality drone, and you'll be able to build applications on top of it far more easily.
It won't be as pretty, but it will be far better.
Same goes for better flight times - most of the drones out there have very undersized batteries and poorly chosen motors, which make them very inefficient

@heyheni yea i understand, but they're just exploring this topic for the first time and intend to use it as a project for students. I wouldn't want to rely on that haha.

@bittersweet haha yea I'm not going to build my own drone, i have about 15 weeks and I don't want to spend it figuring out PWM again.

Go for the parrot bebop 2. There are some open source ROS library available for it.

@Neoxas @heyheni fixed wing drones are not exactly what I'm looking for since they cannot hover, or if they can, object detection might be difficult because of the differences in orientation. they're also usually not as easy to start up, I want to decrease the need for an operator as much as possible.

@marthulu you could hang a gimbal on a fixed wing and get consistently orientated footage, also, if you look for a real fpv-fixed wing they are usually build stol like, being able to fly slow. I would think endurance and action radius is a real benefit for such an application.

@marthulu electric motor fixed wing vehicles are quite easy. Also the perspective issue can be fixed by some Trigonometry. But yea, it's a trade off between hovering and endurance as hovering destroys batteries

I bet Guy from Skycan can give you some decent options, he's a licensed pilot, does rescue & search missions and might just put you in the right direction as he's quite on top of developments in this area. Explain him the story, do tell him it's a free consult, if you're looking for that though. He's a nice and humourous guy, and might lead you to some contacts. He likes and uses Apple though, not a dev at all. x)

But, this being a student thing, is probably plain wrong imho