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You'll generally want to have microcontroller doing this very low level control stuff with hard realtime constraints. If you look at basically any quadrotor you'll notice that they all have a microcontroller for interfacing the motor controllers, IMU, ultrasonic sensors, barometer etc. (and most have the basic attitude stabilization loop running at 100-1000Hz running there too). Even if you'd have the attitude estimation and control running on a PC board, you'd still need a microntoller for interfacing everything. Note that ROS in it's basic form does not satisfy hard real-time constraints (there is the OROCOS integration and a realtime_tools package that could be used for that though).

You'll generally want to have microcontroller doing this very low level control and interfacing stuff with hard realtime constraints. If you look at basically any quadrotor you'll notice that they all have a microcontroller for interfacing the motor controllers, IMU, ultrasonic sensors, barometer etc. (and most have the basic attitude stabilization loop running at 100-1000Hz running there too). Even if you'd have the attitude estimation and control running on a PC board, you'd still need a microntoller for interfacing everything. Note that ROS in it's basic form does not satisfy hard real-time constraints (there is the OROCOS integration and a realtime_tools package that could be used for that though).