DroneOS
Open-source autonomous drone control framework
The DroneOS Command Center — real-time fleet management with AI-powered dispatch.
DroneOS is a framework for autonomous drone control built on ROS 2 and PX4 Autopilot. It provides the developer-friendly abstraction layer between raw flight controller topics and high-level AI-driven operations — from single drone commands to multi-drone fleet coordination.
AI Fleet Dispatch
Autonomous emergency response — AI receives incidents, evaluates the fleet, selects the best drone, and dispatches it. Incident to airborne in ~10 seconds.
Cloud-to-Drone Control
Commands from anywhere over Tailscale VPN. Real-time telemetry, camera feeds, and fleet status streamed to the ground station via WebSocket.
Simulation-in-the-Loop
Full PX4 SITL environment with Gazebo. Test AI decision-making and fleet coordination in simulation before flying real hardware.
Components
drone_core
C++ library and ROS 2 node providing high-level drone control APIs for arming, takeoff, landing, and position control.
drone_control.py
Python library + CLI for remote drone operations over WebSocket. Works from anywhere that can reach rosbridge — including cloud VPS over Tailscale VPN.
AI Fleet Dispatch
Autonomous emergency response system. AI receives incidents, evaluates fleet status, selects the best drone, and flies it to the scene in ~10 seconds.
Ground Station UI
React/TypeScript web interface with real-time telemetry, camera feeds, interactive map, and built-in AI chat for natural language drone control.
camera_ros
ROS 2 camera node using libcamera for Raspberry Pi camera modules. Streams video to the ground station via web_video_server.
Micro-XRCE-DDS-Agent
Bridges PX4 flight controller (running XRCE-DDS client) to the ROS 2 DDS network over serial or UDP.
Architecture
The system splits across two machines: a cloud VPS running the AI fleet commander, dispatch services, and ground station UI — and a drone-side machine running PX4, the DDS bridge, and the drone SDK. Communication happens over Tailscale VPN with ~98ms round-trip latency.
Cloud (VPS)
AI agent (Ada), dispatch service, bridge, ground station UI, rosbridge relay. Orchestrates the fleet.
Drone-Side
PX4 SITL or real flight controller, Micro-XRCE-DDS Agent, drone_core SDK, rosbridge, camera streaming.
Measured Performance
Incident-to-dispatch: ~10-12s. AI decision time: ~3-4s. Drone command execution: ~2.5s over VPN.
Get Started
DroneOS runs on the companion computer (Raspberry Pi), not the flight controller. The GitHub README includes setup instructions for both SITL development and real drone deployment.