Even if you're making a rover or a robot, having a IMU is going to be highly useful. So some kind of IMU is essential. I also believe that sticking with the widely established 40mm square hole mounting standard is a very good idea. Unfortunatly, most ESCs, servos and RC receivers only speak 5v, which is a bummer because otherwise the bidirectionality of the FPGA IO could be used to allow for many different IO configurations. But I think sticking with a strictly CPPM and SBUS system is the way to go in terms of input. Most RXs that you should be using have this system. Also, using an XBEE for control is a very good idea, as is having several UART-type ports for connecting GPS's, OSD's, 3DR telemetry, etc etc.
Having had quite a bit of experience with both AVR based and ARM cortex mX based FCs, I still think making a TRULY autonomous vehicle with the parallella for its brain is a good idea. In an ideal configuration with GPS, XBEE Pro 2b and long range video, it could outperform current offerings significantly. The Epiphany chip lends itself really well for optical flow based positioning, image recognition and of course all the heavy matrix multiplications involved in sensor processing such as that performed by the autoquad system.
I also think its a good idea when considering power consumption, pushing an m-series arm to its limits for real-time math, adding stuff like an RPi to process kinect depth data is hardly ideal in terms of weight and effiency.
Because of this I've decided to go along with this project, but my biggest dilemma is deciding between using the MPU9150 or going for individual sensors that lack any kind of internal processing. Doing all the sensor fusion on the fpga fabric and on the EP, might give us better results but IT WILL take a hell of a lot more work to get it work acceptably and even more so to get it the point where AQ is now.
I'm also unsure as to where to go forward with the depth sensing stuff, as it appears now the capri sensor from primesense won't work for outdoor applications.
Thoughts?