PX4 / ArduPilot stacks, mission planning, swarm logic, vision-guided navigation. We ship hardware-in-the-loop tested, FAA-aware, and built to recover gracefully when the wind picks up.
We architect the flight stack, write the autonomy layer, plan the missions, file the FAA paperwork, and stand on the ground watching the first flight with you. Safety-critical defaults, never optional.
Custom airframe configs, PID tuning on your hardware, sensor calibration scripts, fail-safe rules in the controller — not just in the GCS.
Custom QGroundControl plugins, web-based GCS where the field demands it, waypoint formats that round-trip cleanly between your ops team and the aircraft.
Visual-inertial SLAM with ORB-SLAM3 or OpenVSLAM, vision-based obstacle avoidance, LIDAR fusion when smoke, fog, or dust break the cameras.
Gazebo and PX4 SITL for the autonomy layer, Jsbsim when fixed-wing accuracy matters, AirSim for vision pipelines. Hundreds of hours before the first tethered flight.
Distributed task allocation, encrypted MAVLink mesh, role-based access on the GCS. Proven at 8 aircraft, designed for 32, with measured failure modes per topology.
Part 107 awareness baked in, Section 44807 exemptions for BVLOS, EASA SORA dossiers for Europe. Started in parallel with development so the waiver lands when you're ready to fly.
Autonomy has its own rhythm — simulation first, tethered tests next, open-sky flights last. Our process is built around hardware reality and FAA paperwork, not slide decks.
PX4 vs ArduPilot, sensor stack, RTK requirements, FAA framework. We file the waiver paperwork in parallel so approval lands when you're ready to fly.
Architecture · + FAA filing startedGazebo or PX4 SITL environment built around your mission. Hundreds of simulated flight hours, failure-mode coverage, geofence rules verified — all before any aircraft moves.
Sim coverage · + failure-mode report200+ hours on a 4m tether. PID tuning on your hardware, sensor calibration, mission rehearsals, redundancy checks. We don't go open-sky until every behavior is boring.
Tethered logs · + weekly demo flightsFAA waiver in hand, ground station deployed, comms tested. We stand on the ground next to your pilot for the first three missions, then hand over the keys.
Flight-ready · + telemetry pipelineProduction autonomy programs — each cleared its safety gate, filed its paperwork, and now flies on a customer's calendar.
An autonomous photogrammetry pipeline for utility-scale solar farms. PX4 + custom mission planner, gimbal-stabilized RGB+thermal capture, RTK-pinned waypoints, geo-tagged stitching — surveyed 240ha in 41 minutes, what their crews used to take a full day.
Autonomous multispectral crop-health surveys for large farms. A PX4 mission planner flies pre-mapped grids capturing NDVI imagery, stitched into field-level health maps — flagged stressed zones across 320ha before they were visible from the ground.
A fleet of indoor-autonomous inventory drones for a 220k-sqft DC. Visual-SLAM in GPS-denied aisles, barcode + OCR at fly-by, tied into the WMS — cycle counts in three hours, down from a full weekend.
Fixed-price sprints, full builds, or ongoing programs. We'll tell you which fits in the scoping call — and if none fit, who else to talk to.
A fixed two-week burst. Best for sim-environment setup, hardware / FAA gap analysis, or a focused autonomy prototype.
Idea to first open-sky flight. Full lifecycle — sim, tethered, paperwork, mission. Fixed price, safety-gated.
Embedded autonomy team for behavior expansion, new airframes, and swarm scaling. Monthly engagements, on-call.
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PX4 if you're building a clean autonomy product, integrating with modern companion computers (Jetson, RPi), or shipping to enterprise customers who want a mature toolchain.
ArduPilot if you need a wider hardware envelope (rovers, boats, blimps), want hands-on telemetry control via MAVProxy, or have a team with legacy ArduCopter experience. We're fluent in both — the choice happens in week 0 with your hardware vendor in the room.
Yes. Part 107 awareness is built into every flight plan. For BVLOS, swarm, or above-400ft operations we draft the Section 44807 exemption package or Part 107 waiver and walk it through with FAA Aeronautical Center.
Most waivers take 90–120 days from filing. We start the paperwork in parallel with development so the approval lands when you're ready to fly. EASA paperwork available for European deployments.
You do. We design the autonomy layer — flight controller config, mission planning, ground station, telemetry pipeline. The airframe is yours (or your hardware partner's), the firmware fork is in your GitHub org from week 1.
All Gazebo / Jsbsim simulation environments, MAVSDK test harnesses, and CI pipelines transfer with the project. No vendor lock-in, no "call us to update firmware."
Both. Outdoor flies on RTK GPS for 2cm positioning. Indoor and GPS-denied environments use visual-inertial SLAM (ORB-SLAM3, OpenVSLAM) on a companion computer — we've shipped this for warehouse and tunnel operations.
Transition handling between the two — outdoor flight that enters a building or a covered structure — is the hard part. We architect graceful fallback in week 1.
Vision if SWaP is tight, daylight is reliable, and you have a companion GPU. LIDAR if you fly in fog, dust, low-light, or need cm-accurate obstacle avoidance regardless of texture.
Most production autonomy systems fuse both — Livox or Velodyne LIDAR for safety-critical, vision for richer semantics. We'll quote the sensor package in week 1 with measured failure modes per environment.
Three layers. Sim-first — every behavior validated in Gazebo before tethered tests. Tethered — 200+ flight hours on a 4m tether before open sky. Redundancy — dual-IMU, GPS failover, return-to-home triggered on link loss, geofence enforced in the flight controller.
Black box logs every flight. Post-incident review baked into our weekly cadence. Zero crashes on customer hardware in 4 years, and we'd rather over-engineer than learn from the first one.
Proven at 8 aircraft in production (search-and-rescue, Skyline). Designed and simulated to 32 aircraft for an inventory-mapping pilot. Above that, mesh telemetry becomes the bottleneck — we'd want a specialist comms partner.
Coordination uses our distributed coverage planner (auction-based task allocation) over an encrypted MAVLink mesh. Each aircraft can complete its assigned area autonomously if comms drop.
Sprint tier — $6k, two weeks. We build a custom QGroundControl plugin, Mission Planner add-on, or web-based GCS for your specific operation. Includes mission file format, geofence editor, and live telemetry views.
Real numbers from autonomous flight programs — pulled from MAVLink logs, QGroundControl, and ROS bag data. Updated quarterly.
There's a wall of testimonials on the home page. This is the one that matters for autonomy — a solar operator that replaced a full day of crew work with a 41-minute autonomous flight.
We told BytesGenX our 240-hectare sites took a full day to survey, weather permitting. They came back with a PX4 + RTK + thermal pipeline and flew the first complete survey in 41 minutes, with 2.3cm RTK accuracy on every waypoint.
The FAA paperwork was done before the first flight. That's the part that usually kills projects like this. They handled it like it was Tuesday.
★★★★★"Sim, then tethered, then sky. Boringly safe. Exactly the partner you want flying near humans."
★★★★★"Visual-SLAM in our GPS-denied warehouse actually worked. Three vendors had quoted us before — they were the only ones who delivered."
★★★★★"FAA waiver in 94 days. First flight on day 95. We weren't sure that was possible."
Whether it's a sim-environment sprint or a multi-quarter open-sky deployment, we reply within 4 hours — usually with a fixed quote, a sensor recommendation, and a FAA filing plan.
