PX4 Developer Summit | Virtual 2020: Full Schedule

📌 July 6 & 7 — 8:00 AM (PDT)
📺 Streamed LIVE on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
✨ Check-out all the info and register on our website https://px4.io/virtual-2020/

8:00am PDT

Welcome Remarks Day 1

Speakers

Ramon Roche

General Manager, Dronecode

Monday July 6, 2020 8:00am - 8:15am PDT
LIVE

8:15am PDT

Keynote: Setting the standards in the drone industry for a decade

Dr. Lorenz Meier, chairman of Dronecode, and author of PX4, MAVLink, QGC, and Pixhawk, takes you on a tour on how the open-source community works, and shows you so many organizations in the industry trust us, and openly collaborate.

Speakers

Dr. Lorenz Meier

Founder and CEO, Creator of PX4, Auterion

Dr. Lorenz Meier is Founder and CEO of Auterion and the founder of a number of important open source projects for the drone industry that include PX4, MAVLink, QGroundControl and is the creator of the Pixhawk autopilot. He is a veteran of the drone industry since 2008 with more than... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2020 8:15am - 9:00am PDT
LIVE

Keynote

9:00am PDT

PX4 failsafe testing using MAVSDK

In order to ensure the safety and robustness of PX4 as it evolves, failsafe testing is critical.

This talk aims to give an overview of how failure can be triggered to test a certain failsafe response. I will be explaining the underlying architecture that enables this and shows how to do it using MAVSDK.

I also plan to hint at how this failsafe testing can be integrated as part of the PX4 continuous integration.

Speakers

Julian Oes

Senior Software Engineer, Auterion

PX4 and MAVSDK maintainer

Monday July 6, 2020 9:00am - 9:15am PDT
PRE-RECORDED

MAVSDK

9:00am PDT

Towards a Lightweight Software Architecture for PX4 Computer Vision

We present a powerful, yet lightweight, software architecture designed to run on an embedded companion computer alongside a PX4 flight controller. This architecture provides multi-modal computer vision functionality to PX4 such as: Visual Obstacle Avoidance (VOA), an open source Visual Inertial Odometry (VINS Fusion), Fiducial Marker Relocalization, and Object Tracking. We demonstrate functionality of this architecture on a ModalAI PX4 development platform and present our roadmap for future development.

Speakers

James Strawson

Senior Roboticist, ModalAI, Inc.

James Strawson is the lead roboticist at ModalAI, a Blue UAS Framework manufacturer of American-made, autonomous autopilots for drones and ground robots. Strawson received a Ph.D in robotics from UCSD where he also taught classes on 3D printing, mechanical design, feedback control... Read More →

px4 summit 2020 ModalAI pptx

Monday July 6, 2020 9:00am - 9:30am PDT
LIVE

Hardware

9:30am PDT

An In-depth Look at the Multicopter Control System Architecture

This session takes a deep dive into the multicopter control system. The current controller architecture will be presented and explained. Block diagrams and the relevant sections in code of each individual controller will be given.

The aim is to provide sufficient information for new developers that would like to design a control system for a multicopter either by tuning the current PID gains, extending and/or modifying the current controllers. To do this, knowledge of the control system architecture is required. This session provides that information to empower developers.

Speakers

Anton Erasmus

PhD Student, Stellenbosch University

An In Depth Look at the Multicopter Control System Architecture pdf

Monday July 6, 2020 9:30am - 9:45am PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Navigation & Controls

9:30am PDT

Open Source Workflow for Advanced Vehicle Dynamics Simulation

The Open Source community supports a wide variety of tool sets to enable software and hardware in the loop simulation including Gazebo, X-Plane, FlightGear, iMAVSim, AirSim, and RealFlight. Each of these tools have their specific applications and advantages. The presentation will focus on an open source workflow including NASA open source parametric geometry (OpenVSP), JSBSim , and integrations with front-end visualization such as FlightGear. The talk will conclude with a review of implementation options, applications (such as software validation), demonstration of a SITL solution for a 50 lb VTOL airframe, and opportunities for future development.

Speakers

Matt Vacanti

Senior Product Manager, GE Aviation

Solving aviation’s next challenging problem: the proliferation, integration and use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), air mobility, and advanced autonomy in civil aviation.

Jesse Hoskins

System Engineer, GE Aviation

Jesse Hoskins is a Systems Engineer at GE Aviation with a B.S.E in Aerospace Engineering and M.S.E in Computer Science. He has worked with PX4 flight controls, hardware/software-in-the-loop simulation, and open-source accessible aerodynamic modeling of various UAS

Monday July 6, 2020 9:30am - 10:00am PDT
LIVE

Testing & Simulation

10:00am PDT

Break Day 1

Monday July 6, 2020 10:00am - 10:05am PDT
LIVE

10:00am PDT

Simulated Workflows using Software-In-The-Loop Simulations

Software-In-The-Loop simulations have been a great tool to speed up the development process for developers in the PX4 community.

In this session, we show how this approach can be used for testing advanced flight control features such as high risk flight control features to multi-vehicle simulations. Also, we explore how this tool can be extended for testing complex interactions of vehicle subcomponents beyond the firmware using mavlink as a interface.

Speakers

Jaeyoung Lim

Drone Software Engineer, Auterion AG

Monday July 6, 2020 10:00am - 10:15am PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Testing & Simulation

10:05am PDT

Flying into virtual: the new reality for aerial educational robotics

This session introduces the new challenges that the robotics education faces, and ways to adapt educational products to the lockdown. Authors of Clover educational drone kit will share their experience — from creating online courses and using the simulation to organizing competitions of remotely programmed drones.

Main Speaker

Andrei Korigodskii

CTO, COEX

Speakers

Oleg Kalachev

Lead Developer, Copter Express Ltd.

Oleg Kalachev is an active open source movement participant. He collaborated in various open projects, including PX4 and ROS. He’s the main developer of the software platform for an educational quadcopter Clover. He was a jury member and organizer of numerous robotics competitions... Read More →

Aleksei Rogachevskii

Software Developer, COEX

Software developer @ COEX, working on the Clover project. ROS enthusiast. Involved in all sorts of stuff, from fixing bugs to writing code to packaging to maintaining CI infrastructure. Ask me about writing Gazebo plugins and making .debs for Raspbian.

Monday July 6, 2020 10:05am - 10:35am PDT
LIVE

Community Spotlight

10:30am PDT

Drones4Energy Inspection

The session will be about the Drones4Energy project and its achievements in its second year. It is 3-years, Danish national project, started in December 2018 with a budget of 3M Euro. Details: https://drones4energy.dk/

Drones4Energy is an innovative drone project that contributes to the state of the art of electrical and communication engineering technologies to build a fully autonomous drone system that can charge itself from overhead powerline cables.

The overarching goal of the project is to deliver a collaborative drone system that can inspect the power grid in a highly efficient way. The project aims at using the powerline cables as an energy source to charge the drones without modifying the power grid’s infrastructure.

In this talk, I will be sharing the experiences of integrating PX4+ROS+QGC with other Hardware/Software/Communication elements to achieve the project goals.

Speakers

Emad Samuel Malki Ebeid

Associate Professor, University of Southern Denmark

Ebeid is working as an Associate Professor at SDU UAS Centre, Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Instituttet, University of Southern Denmark. Ebeid is researching drone system designs to operate and grasp on overhead energized cables for inspection and recharging.Ebeid is the Coordinator of... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2020 10:30am - 10:45am PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Community Spotlight

10:35am PDT

Overview of multicopter control from sensors to motors

We give an overview of the components within PX4 to control multicopter vehicles from sensor input pipeline over estimation, through cascaded position, attitude, rate control and the output allocation. We can only zoom in on certain selected aspects and are happy to answer additional related questions.

Speakers

Mathieu Bresciani

Flight Control Engineer, Auterion

Matthias Grob

Software Engineer, Flight Control, Auterion

Electrical engineering master at ETH Zürich Drone enthusiast since 2012 PX4 contributor since 2015 Professional flight control developer since 2016

PX4 Developer Summit 2020 Overview of multicopter control from sensors to motors pdf

Monday July 6, 2020 10:35am - 11:05am PDT
LIVE

Navigation & Controls, Subtype1

11:05am PDT

Embedded machine learning in practice

TinyML is a global community of software engineers and data scientists working together to bring more intelligence to sensors on embedded devices. This movement has enabled a wide range of applications on the tiniest of devices, from predictive maintenance to object detection to sound recognition. In systems where decision-making needs to happen in real-time, it is important that the processing can be done as close as possible to the data source - enhancing security and cutting down on network energy consumption, latency and bandwidth usage.

During this talk, you will learn why you should consider doing ML even on the most constrained computing devices available to you and how to get started in practice.

Speakers

Alessandro Grande

IoT Ecosystem manager, Arm

Embedded ML in Practice pdf

Monday July 6, 2020 11:05am - 11:35am PDT
LIVE

Hardware

11:30am PDT

The Simulator-In-Hardware (SIH), a low cost and hard real time HITL

This session presents the SIH module https://dev.px4.io/master/en/simulation/simulation-in-hardware.html, the motivations, comparison with standard HITL, how to use it, understanding the code, and bringing modifications.

Speakers

Romain Chiappinelli

Aerospace Engineer Consultant, Freelance

Aerospace consultant working with PX4, developing autopilot and HITL simulator for non conventional vehicles and VTOL aircraft. Currently working on the speeder project for JetPack Aviaton.

Monday July 6, 2020 11:30am - 11:45am PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Testing & Simulation

11:35am PDT

Using PX4 for Educational Satellites: CanSats

If the future of drones is sofware defined, then the future of satellites (CubeSats) could be software defined as well. CubeSats are a fast follower of drone technology and I believe what works for drones can be repurposed for satellites as well. In this presentation, I will exhibit how PX4 was used for Educational Satellite (CanSat) training in Nepal and what I believe the future can be for PX4 and space.

Speakers

Abhas Maskey

PhD Student, Kyushu Institute of Technology

Has been directly involved in four different satellite (CubeSat) projects placing seven satellites in orbit. This also involved building and launching first satellite of Nepal, NepaliSat-1. Is interested in camera design for space applications, machine learning for image classification... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2020 11:35am - 12:05pm PDT
LIVE

Community Spotlight

12:05pm PDT

Skynode Ready for Liftoff

It's been two months since we announced Skynode and now we're getting ready for liftoff. In this 4 minute lightning talk we will recap why we think Skynode is the next big thing after Pixhawk and introduce our early access program.

Speakers

Laurent Zimmerli

Head of Product Marketing, Auterion

Sponsors

Auterion

Monday July 6, 2020 12:05pm - 12:15pm PDT
LIVE

Hardware

12:15pm PDT

Field Tests of a Novel Swarm Control Framework

The Raytheon BBN Technologies Unmanned Innovations Lab and teammates SIFT and OSU recently conducted the third planned field exercise of a novel swarm control framework, Command and Control of Aggregate Swarm Tactics (CCAST). The framework envisions controlling and monitoring swarms of up to 250 collaborative unmanned systems. The proposed video will show how we prepared for and successfully deployed over 60 heterogeneous autonomous systems simultaneously to cooperatively explore an urban area and modify their behaviors while interacting with pre-positioned items in the environment.

Speakers

Kyle Usbeck

Lead Engineer, Systems & Technology Research

Kyle conducts research and development in collaborative autonomy of unmanned systems.

Monday July 6, 2020 12:15pm - 12:30pm PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Navigation & Controls

12:15pm PDT

What's up with your battery?

The majority of PX4 autopilot users have built their own vehicles with batteries that do not possess a battery lifecycle management system. In this session, we will introduce the basic concepts behind a battery management system (BMS) and how it is integrated into PX4 via the SMBUS protocol. We will also review how the BMS manages the battery and demonstrate the utility of the proposed system.

Speakers

Hyon Lim

CEO and Co-founder, Uvify

Hyon Lim is a cofounder and CEO of UVify, an aerial robot manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington USA with R&D and manufacturing operations in Seoul, South Korea. Hyon’s specialties range from computer vision to aeronautical engineering. He co-founded UVify in 2017 together... Read More →

Sponsors

Uvify

Monday July 6, 2020 12:15pm - 12:45pm PDT
LIVE

Hardware

12:45pm PDT

What's the difference between a drone and a flying robot?

When a ROS developer looks at a drone, it's a robot that can fly. When a PX4 developer looks at a ground robot it's a plane that can only taxi. Both are valid perspectives, but how do we reconcile the viewpoints? This talk will explore what's unique about drones and where there's tools that might be valuable to leverage from the general robotics community, as well as looking at what in the drone community could potentially be reused in the general robotics community. And finally, what are good ways that the communities can collaborate?

Speakers

Tully Foote

ROS Platform Manager, Open Robotics

Tully worked on autonomous cars for the DARPA Grand Challenges through undergraduate and graduate school, reaching the finals of all three events. Following that he worked on ROS at Willow Garage and later Open Robotics in many different roles. He has worked on a large variety of... Read More →

Monday July 6, 2020 12:45pm - 1:15pm PDT
LIVE

ROS

1:15pm PDT

Getting started as a contributor on PX4

PX4 is a big subject, sometimes it can be daunting to even begin looking at how to get started. We are going to present an overview of: the ways people can contribute to the project, how they can get started, and where they can go to drill deeper into particular areas of interest. While this content is directed at getting volunteers spun up efficiently, hopefully it will be of use to anyone getting started with PX4. This presentation includes a pdf file with important reference content and details which were omitted from the video, attendees are encouraged to refer to that pdf for additional information.

Speakers

Mark West

Founder, Developer, Telemething

Software dev. Drones, HoloLens, ROS, PX4, iOS, Android, Windows, Azure.

Getting Started as a contributor on PX4 pdf

Monday July 6, 2020 1:15pm - 1:30pm PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Getting Started

1:15pm PDT

Microsoft AirSim: Applications to Research and Industry

In this talk, I will begin with an overview of Microsoft AirSim, an open source simulator for autonomous vehicles built on Unreal Engine, and its applications in both industry and academia. Then, I will shift focus to enabling drone racing research with AirSim, and highlight two recent projects. The first being Game of Drones - a simulation-based drone racing competition at NeurIPS 2019. And secondly, a research project focusing on learning representations and imitation learning to address the drone racing problem.

Speakers

Ratnesh Madaan

Research Software Development Engineer, Microsoft

Sponsors

Microsoft

Monday July 6, 2020 1:15pm - 1:45pm PDT
LIVE

Testing & Simulation

1:45pm PDT

The BVLOS future of drone software and industry standardization

James will present on the dramatic changes occurring in the drone software landscape as the commercial drone industry moves towards Beyond Line of Sight operations and begins to adopt safety and design standards. Specifically, James will address the recent ASTM Standard Specification for Detect and Avoid Performance Requirements* and Software Dependability requirements which governs the performance and functional characteristics of drone operations equipped with autonomous detect and avoid, critical for enabling the expansion of drone operations to the Beyond Line of Sight realm.

In the presentation James will cover detailed examples of the changes needed in different parts of the PX4 drone software ecosystem (specifically QGroundControl and PX4 Autopilot Firmware) related to some of the ASTM standard requirements and begin a conversation around how the PX4 community and the wider open source drone software community can begin to adopt these standards in its continued development and improvement.

* ASTM WK62668 (https://www.astm.org/DATABASE.CART/WORKITEMS/WK62668.htm) is anticipated to publish in June 2020 a definition for the minimum performance standards for DAA systems applicable to smaller UAS BLVOS operations for the protection of manned aircraft in lower altitude airspace.

Speakers

James Howard

CTO, Iris Automation

I am the founder and VP Engineering of Iris Automation, developer of the worlds best Detect and Avoid technology! I\\'m excited about BVLOS operations and the future of our industry.

2020 07 06 PX4 Dev Summit BVLOS Future & Standards Adoption pdf

Monday July 6, 2020 1:45pm - 2:15pm PDT
LIVE

Regulatory

2:15pm PDT

Closing Remarks Day 1

Speakers

Ramon Roche

General Manager, Dronecode

Monday July 6, 2020 2:15pm - 2:30pm PDT
LIVE

8:00am PDT

Welcome Remarks Day 2

Speakers

Ramon Roche

General Manager, Dronecode

Tuesday July 7, 2020 8:00am - 8:15am PDT
LIVE

8:15am PDT

Pixhawk : Community Driven Open Standards for Drones

Main Speaker

Dr. Lorenz Meier

Founder and CEO, Creator of PX4, Auterion

Speakers

Nuno Marques

Founder and Lead Software Engineer, Drone Solutions

Nuno Marques has more than 5 years of software engineering and system integration experience as a contractor and consultant, recording the participation in over 30 projects and product development for more than 25 companies and organisations in the drone industry over these years... Read More →

Michael Schäuble

Product Manager, Auterion

Alex Klimaj

Owner/Electrical Engineer, ARK Electronics

I’m Alex Klimaj, the owner/engineer of ARK Electronics. Based in Salt Lake City Utah, I do electronics design consulting in addition to creating my own products. I received my bachelors of Electrical Engineering from California Polytechnic San Luis Obispo in 2014. During college... Read More →

Peter Van Der Perk

Embedded Software Engineer, NXP Semiconductors

I work for NXP Semiconductors in the CTO Systems Innovations team. Where I’m currently working on a research to improve functional safety for drones. Furthermore I’m also working various products for our mobile robotics team, where work on system solutions for drones in various... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2020 8:15am - 9:00am PDT
LIVE

Keynote

9:00am PDT

(CANCELED) Extreme level localisation for Swarm UAVs in Indoor Unknown Environment

THIS SESSION IS CANCELED DUE TO UNCONTROLLABLE CIRCUMSTANCES

THANKS FOR UNDERSTANDING

This session will talk about an extreme localization method for swarm UAVs in an Indoor Unknown Environment, with just a monocular camera and a tracking camera. I'll also talk about mapping (primarily for search and rescue purposes) and talk about the algorithm I've developed as part of my mandatory degree requirement.

Speakers

Nadeem Mohammed Shajahan

Student Researcher, TKM College of Engineering

I like to play with drones and built real world applications using Deep Learning and Computer Vision.

Tuesday July 7, 2020 9:00am - 9:15am PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Navigation & Controls

9:00am PDT

An SoC-independent and open platform aims to help to standardize high-performance AI-enabled drones

With the increasing demand for computing capability, low power systems, flexible I/O as well as a mature software platform, the next generation of drones are calling for much more powerful silicon as well as differentiation these have to offer. Recently the largest cross silicon platform open standard organization, 96Boards, has joined forces with Dronecode to define the standard for high-performance drones. With its long list of silicon members and manufacturing partners worldwide, 96Boards brings high-performance silicon in a standardized approach to establish a generic hardware platform for drones.

Speakers

Yang Zhang

Director, 96Boards

Sponsors

96 Boards

96boards Drone PX4 pdf

Tuesday July 7, 2020 9:00am - 9:30am PDT
LIVE

Hardware

9:30am PDT

Is it a drone? Is it a plane? No, it's Jetman!

The Swiss pilot and inventor Yves Rossy has created the Jetman --a wearable wing powered by four jet engines-- with two simple goals: fly like a bird and have fun. After 25 years of development, the Jetman has demonstrated amazing feats, among which were the crossing of the English channel, a flight in the Grand Canyon, and formation flights with the French Acrobatic Patrol. However, to enable a truly autonomous human flight, the last remaining step was vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) from the ground.

In this session, I will show how the PX4 ecosystem enabled the world first VTOL flight with a wearable wing capable of a maximum speed of 350 km/h and a maximum altitude of 5000 meters. The presentation will focus on both the technical and safety aspects of the project, and will contain behind the scenes images of the test flights.

Speakers

Julien Lecoeur

R&D Engineer, Flybotix

Tuesday July 7, 2020 9:30am - 10:00am PDT
LIVE

Community Spotlight, Subtype 2

10:00am PDT

Break 1 Day 2

Tuesday July 7, 2020 10:00am - 10:05am PDT
LIVE

10:00am PDT

SmartWings - Active Turbulence Suppression for Aircraft

Research project on active turbulence suppression for aircraft. By means of anticipating pressure sensors in front as well as reactive intertial measurements inside of the aircraft it is possible to counteract disturbance effects of atmospheric turbulence in flight by deflecting control surfaces accordingly. Disturbances of the vertical acceleration, pitch rate and roll rate of an aircraft are likely to be reduced below 20% RMS.

Within the research project (TU Wien with three industry partners) unmanned and manned test flights are performed featuring Pixhawk flight controller, PX4 flight stack and additional custom hardware and software.

Speakers

Andras Galffy

CTO, Turbulence Solutions

Passionate Pilot - manned and unmanned.Control Engineer and Mechatronics Enthusiast.Make flights turbulence-free.

Tuesday July 7, 2020 10:00am - 10:15am PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Community Spotlight

10:05am PDT

Bringing micro-ROS to PX4-based flying systems

micro-ROS is a Robot Operating System specifically tailored for embedded and resource-constrained platforms, such as microcontrollers.

It is an open-source software that runs on Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS), such as NuttX and Zephyr. Above that, it runs the ROS 2 stack with a few microcontrollers-specific improvements. It offers powerful developer tools, such as a complete build system for different RTOSes and hardware platforms, and the whole pool of robotic applications available in a ROS 2 environment.

micro-ROS promotes microcontrollers to the ROS 2 world, and uses as a middleware eProsima Micro XRCE-DDS, that is, DDS for eXtremely Resource-Constrained Environments, a software solution allowing the integration of microcontrollers into the DDS world.

DDS is a communication protocol that deploys a Data-Centric Publisher-Subscriber model, whose implementation eProsima Fast DDS is the default middleware supported by ROS 2. The protocol used by eProsima Fast DDS to exchange messages over standard networks is the Real-Time Publish-Subscribe protocol (RTPS), an interoperability wire protocol for DDS.

Following the latest successful results of the integration of micro-ROS into microcontrollers and devices running different RTOSes, including NuttX, we suggest that micro-ROS could be seamlessly and profitably integrated into the PX4 ecosystem in the near future.

While the task of integrating PX4 into the DDS world has been dealt with by means of the micro-RTPS bridge so far, the present proposal hinges on the need for a more mature, flexible and secure interface with DDS that would be carried out by micro-ROS, and can be seen as a natural extension of the work done in the past over the micro-RTPS bridge. Actually, micro-RTPS was the first prototype and the origin of the micro-ROS project.

We therefore deem reasonable and desirable the exploration of XRCE-DDS and the possible migration from the micro-RTPS bridge implementation to micro-ROS in the PX4 ecosystem.

This talk will focus on presenting all of the concepts mentioned above, namely DDS, RTPS, XRCE-DDS and micro-ROS. We will then go over how both micro-ROS and the micro-RTPS bridge work, presenting a comparison between them. Finally, we will trace an ideal roadmap to migrate from the micro-RTPS bridge to micro-ROS, furthermore adding support of the latter to a platform like the Auterion Skynode.

Speakers

Jaime Martin-Losa

CEO, eProsima (Experts on Middleware)

Nuno Marques

Founder and Lead Software Engineer, Drone Solutions

microROS presentation PX4DevSummit 2020 pdf

Tuesday July 7, 2020 10:05am - 10:35am PDT
LIVE

ROS

10:30am PDT

Uncomplicated Application-level Vehicular Communication And Networking (UAVCAN) for drones

We will briefly introduce the UAVCAN project once again and explain the benefits compared to some of the similar technologies for real-time distributed vehicular control systems. We will describe the current status of the project and invite new contributors to join the effort.

Speakers

Pavel Kirienko

Founder/CEO, Zubax Robotics

Helping enterprises around the world create aerial transport of the 21st century: electric, autonomous, dependable.

Tuesday July 7, 2020 10:30am - 10:45am PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Hardware

10:35am PDT

Our journey to achieve event-enabled autonomy (3-design choices)

We are an autonomous delivery startup based in The Netherlands.
We harness the power of PX4 ecosystem along with cutting-edge Cloud solutions to enable Event-driven Autonomy for our drones. Simply put, it was hard (but super fun!).
Via this talk, we would like to distill and share our learnings in the form of 3 design choices (we call them as U-turns) which enables event-driven autonomy for our drones.

#1 Python and/or C++?
#2 When to 'Edge over Cloud'?
#3 When to 'Cloud over Edge'?

Net, our talk summarises best practices (our version) in realization of a ‘forward-looking’ autonomous drone delivery architecture. See you soon!

Speakers

Ram Grandhi

Co-Founder & Fellow Developer, BreatheDigital B.V.

Weekday dreamer, weekend nerd. Passionate about marrying hardware and software, for a better mankind.

Deepak Singh

Technical Research Intern, BreatheDigital B.V.

I am a final year undergraduate student majoring in Electronics and Communication Engineering from NSIT college, Delhi. Currently I am working as a technical research intern in BreatheDigital B.V. . I primarily work on obstacle detection and trajectory planning. My areas of interest... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2020 10:35am - 11:05am PDT
LIVE

Community Spotlight

11:00am PDT

The cybersecurity status of PX4

In this session, Víctor from Alias Robotics will present a short evaluation of the current cybersecurity status of the PX4 autopilot. Following a data-based approach and by comparing it with other existing open source solutions for drones, Víctor will briefly cover some of the cyber security flaws in the source code, make recommendations and proposals to improve the overall security. The speech will finish by covering the typical DevSevOps cycle in robotics and will launch some open questions on how this could be embedded into the PX4 dev. cycle.

Speakers

Víctor Mayoral Vilches

CTO, Alias Robotics

Roboticist. Experience leading different groups across projects in robotics, AI and cybersecurity. Spent the last 10 years building robots. Selected in 2017 as one of the ten most innovative individuals under 35 in Spain by the MIT Technology Review for his work in robot modularity... Read More →

cybersecurity status PX4 pdf

Tuesday July 7, 2020 11:00am - 11:15am PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Regulatory

11:05am PDT

Extending MAVSDK with new features

This session will explain how proto definitions and auto-generation can be leveraged to extend MAVSDK. Either by adding a MAVLink message to an existing plugin, or by creating a new plugin completely. The demo will show that the logic has to be written only once in C++, and that it is then propagated to the language bindings through auto-generation. It will also explain that this is independent from MAVLink, and could be used to leverage other interfaces (e.g. a REST interface to a web server).

Speakers

Jonas Vautherin

Software Engineer, Auterion

MAVSDK Maintainer

Tuesday July 7, 2020 11:05am - 11:35am PDT
LIVE

MAVSDK

11:30am PDT

Autonomous Exploration Path Planning in High-risk Environments using Aerial Robots

In this talk we present a library of exploration path planning algorithms for aerial robots operating in high-risk settings such as underground environments. Given a previously unknown space, the exploration planners provide collision-free trajectories to navigate the space and build a complete map of the environment autonomously. The set of presented planners emphasize different aspects, such as on large-scale narrow-width subterranean environments, saliency-aware exploration, uncertainty-aware navigation and more. Among the multiple planners in the presented set, we will particularly emphasize on a novel graph-based planning framework purposefully built for aerial robots in subterranean environments such as underground mines, metropolitan infrastructure, and caverns. Given their often large-scale topology and complex network of branches, a bifurcated approach consisting of local and global planning layers is designed. The local planner employs a rapidly-exploring random graph to efficiently identify exploration paths within a local subspace. The global planner is developed as another layer to reposition the robot towards other unexplored areas over the global map when the robot reaches a dead-end situation. This planning algorithm is evaluated extensively in a variety of underground mines and bunkers in the U.S. and in Switzerland. The framework is also being used by the CERBERUS team in DARPA Subterranean Challenge which focuses on innovative robotics solutions for exploration and search missions in underground environments (https://www.subtchallenge.com/). Secondly, we will also focus on two multi-objective planners that co-optimize for exploration (extrinsic goal) and the intrinsic goals of localization uncertainty minimization and salient region re-observation. All the planners are interfaced via the Robot Operating System, a subset is open-sourced already, and to a great extent have been tested with PX4-enabled platforms.

A list of demonstration videos from our experiments and field deployments could be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3qlfAXmuOFIr-m8ScWJXdDO88_feibTq

Software related to the proposed planners that are already open-sourced is available at
- Graph-based Exploration Planner for Subterranean Environments: https://github.com/unr-arl/gbplanner_ros (in progress)
- Motion-primitives Based Planner for Fast & Agile Exploration: https://github.com/unr-arl/mbplanner_ros (in progress)
- Visual Saliency-aware Exploration Planner: https://github.com/unr-arl/rhem_planner
- Uncertainty-aware Receding Horizon Exploration and Mapping: https://github.com/unr-arl/vseplanner
- Tutorial: https://www.autonomousrobotslab.com/subtplanning.html

Speakers

Tung Dang

Graduate Researcher, University of Nevada, Reno

I am Tung Dang, PhD candidate at the University of Nevada, Reno. Currently, my research is focused on the informative path planning for autonomous exploration in large-scale subterranean environments.

Tuesday July 7, 2020 11:30am - 11:45am PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Navigation & Controls

11:35am PDT

Automated testing as part of PX4 development

Who this session is for: anybody who wants to contribute to, debug or maintain PX4.
This session motivates the use of automated testing in PX4, of all types, and explains which type of testing should be used in what circumstances.
It ends with a technical demo of how to implement Unit and Functional tests with GTest, as a kickoff point for new contributors.

Speakers

Julian Kent

Robotics Team Lead, Auterion

Julian is a senior engineer at Auterion, where he co-ordinates the robotics focused activities, balancing core feature development with supporting Auterion customer integration work. He also lends his expertise in electronics, software and hardware design around the company as ne... Read More →

Automated testing as part of PX4 development(1) pdf

Tuesday July 7, 2020 11:35am - 12:05pm PDT
LIVE

Testing & Simulation

12:05pm PDT

Break 2 Day 2

Tuesday July 7, 2020 12:05pm - 12:15pm PDT
LIVE

12:15pm PDT

Control Allocation: reworking the PX4 mixing system

In the PX4 stack, the output of the controllers is converted into actuator commands by mixers.
Although very powerful for the insiders, the current mixing system is not user-friendly and is limited to static configurations.In this session, we present ongoing work on control allocation, which aims at complementing or even replacing the current mixing system.
The future control allocation module promises easier and more flexible airframe configuration, while enabling new features such as the continuous control of tilt-rotor transitions, and the handling of actuator failures.

Speakers

Julien Lecoeur

R&D Engineer, Flybotix

Silvan Fuhrer

Software Engineer, Flight Control, Auterion

Flight control engineer focusing on fixed-wing VTOL applications.

Tuesday July 7, 2020 12:15pm - 12:45pm PDT
LIVE

Navigation & Controls

12:45pm PDT

PX4, an autonomous drone competition, an octocopter, and a bunch of high schoolers. What could go wrong?

We will be talking about how we first learned about and started using PX4 and the Dronecode ecosystem (including Pixhawk, PX4, and MAVLink) and our experiences working with the open-source community and open-source software. Additionally, we will share some background information on our club, as well as our progress up to this point and forwards as we enter the AUVSI SUAS autonomous drone competition next year. Finally, we will talk about our future plans; how we are continuing to contribute to the open-source community and some fun projects we hope to do in the future.

Speakers

Kai Gottschalk

Electrical Lead, AmadorUAVs

Kalyan Sriram

President, AmadorUAVs

Kalyan Sriram is a high school student in Pleasanton, California. He is the president of AmadorUAVs, an autonomous aerial vehicles and robotics club at Amador Valley High School, where he develops embedded software, electronics, and utilizes/contributes to Dronecode projects. He is... Read More →

Vincent Wang

Software Engineer, AmadorUAVs

Vincent Wang is a software engineer and resident human at AmadorUAVs, a high school autonomous robotics-focused club in Pleasanton, California, where he utilizes Dronecode software to develop extensible, high-level control solutions for aerial vehicles. He has years of experience... Read More →

Justin Park

Assistant Mechanical Lead, AmadorUAVs

Ishan Duriseti

Lead Mechanical Engineer, AmadorUAVs

Ishan Duriseti is the mechanical lead at AmadorUAVs, a high school club based in Pleasanton, California that designs and builds autonomous robots and aerial vehicles. There, he designs and adapts custom multirotor frames as well as the physical aspects of other supporting systems... Read More →

Marie Lee

Business, AmadorUAVs

Sungje Park

Management, AmadorUAVs

Tuesday July 7, 2020 12:45pm - 1:00pm PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Community Spotlight

12:45pm PDT

Getting started using UAVCAN v1 with PX4 on the NXP UAVCAN Board

Introduction to the NXP RDDRONE-UCANS32K146 reference board running PX4 & UAVCAN v1.We'll talk about the S32K MCU and its features, CAN bus and CAN FD, NuttX, PX4 and of course UAVCAN v1.

We don't make drones, we make reference designs using our silicon. Learn how this benefits you with opensource reference designs and proven starting points for modular safe and secure solutions. Gain insight into accessories and modules Drone and Rover development that NXP is working on including: battery management, CAN-FD interfaces, security and 2-wire ethernet.

Speakers

Peter Van Der Perk

Embedded Software Engineer, NXP Semiconductors

Sponsors

NXP

Tuesday July 7, 2020 12:45pm - 1:15pm PDT
LIVE

Hardware

1:15pm PDT

What does it take to fly the PX4 stack on a certified aircraft?

Safety standards for the aviation industry are challenging and evolving rapidly. This presentation will focus on safety standards such as DO-178 B/C and how it's applicable for the PX4 flight stack. We will focus specifically on Design Assurance Levels, Safety Assurance Levels, and process related to the certification.

Speakers

Gokul Krishna Srinivasan

Director of Technology, Robots Expert Finland Oy

Here's a short summary of my background:1. Educational background in robotics (unmanned aerial systems) and artificial intelligence2. Field experience with UAVs (commercial, tactical & defense), sensor systems, ground systems3. Was listed as one of the top 5 founders in Finland in... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2020 1:15pm - 1:30pm PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Regulatory

1:15pm PDT

Autonomous Drone Inspections using AirSim and PX4

Drones are increasingly moving from manual operations to more autonomous operations and missions. Inspection is one of the more demanded escenarios.
Microsoft’s autonomous systems platform enables you to build increased autonomy into your drone solutions. Using PX4 and Microsoft’s simulator AirSim you will learn how to architect an autonomous inspection solution.

Speakers

Guada Casuso

Principal Product Manager Autonomous systems, Microsoft

Paul Stubbs

Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Paul Stubbs is a Principal Program Manager for Microsoft, focusing on autonomous systems, such as aerial vehicles, drones, industrial robotics, and simulators. As an FAA certified remote drone pilot, Paul works on building tools, services, AI, and simulations for autonomous drone... Read More →

Sponsors

Microsoft

Tuesday July 7, 2020 1:15pm - 1:45pm PDT
LIVE

Testing & Simulation

1:45pm PDT

PX4: Contributing to Docs

Overview of what our docs are, why you should contribute, and how you contribute.
- Quick Edits
- Complete Docs
- Translations

Speakers

Hamish Willee

Senior Technical Writer, Auterion

Hamish Willee is PX4 Dev Team maintainer for Dronecode documentation sets, including PX4, MAVLink and QGroundControl. I'm interested in technical writing and documentation tools, and working with communities to reduce the barriers to participation. I'm based in Melbourne, Australia... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2020 1:45pm - 2:00pm PDT
PRE-RECORDED

Getting Started

1:45pm PDT

PX4 and FAA Type Certification

PX4-based vehicles are in the first group of applicants that the FAA is reviewing for the new streamlined performance-based Type Certification, which will make it much easier for them to be granted permission to fly beyond Part 107 restrictions after October, when most of the current waivers expire.

I lead one team going through this with the FAA and also lead the ASTM process to create a standard for the testing to get such a certification. PX4 data is becoming the template for such testing, and I'll talk about several of the more challenging aspects of that that we're working through, including the inclusion of simulation data in lieu of some flight data and allowance for third-party apps built on MAVSDK

Speakers

Chris Anderson

CEO, 3DR

Along with founding Dronecode and co-founding the ArduPilot project way back in the day, I'm now mostly focused on drone regulation. I'm a member of the FAA's Drone Advisory Committee, lead the ASTM drone type certification working group, and 3DR is one of the first companies to go... Read More →

Tuesday July 7, 2020 1:45pm - 2:15pm PDT
LIVE

Regulatory

2:15pm PDT

Hovergames Challenge 2

NXP announces Hovergames Challenge 2: Help Drones Help Others - During Pandemics.

Learn why you should join this virtual coding challenge to improve your PX4 skills and inspire others in the community.
We'll talk about the challenge, the HoverGames Hardware, and introduce the new NavQ i.MX 8M Mini companion processor.

We don't make drones, we make reference designs using our silicon. Learn how this benefits you with opensource reference designs and proven starting points for modular safe and secure solutions. Gain insight into accessories and modules Drone and Rover development that NXP is working on including: battery management, CAN-FD interfaces, security and 2-wire ethernet.

Speakers

Iain Galloway

NXP Mobile Robotics Program Lead, NXP Semiconductors

Iain Galloway P.Eng. is the mobile robotics team lead an engineer within the CTOorganization, Systems Innovation team, R&D Automotive, working from the NXPSemiconductors Austin Texas office. Previously he was with Freescale Semiconductors,formerly Motorola, and has over 25 years of... Read More →

Sponsors

NXP

Tuesday July 7, 2020 2:15pm - 2:45pm PDT
LIVE

Community Spotlight

2:30pm PDT

PX4 state estimation update

The talk will be a status and summary progress report on changes made to the PX4 navigation state estimator since the last conference. It will contain a description of the new yaw estimator algorithm that has enabled operation without a magnetomer or external yaw sensor, and enabled automatic recovery from loss of navigation due to bad magnetometer or yaw sensor data.

Speakers