Towards Obstacle Avoidance on the PX4 Pro Autopilot Stack

The PX4 project has gone a long way since its humble beginnings in 2008 when Lorenz Meier created the Pixhawk Team at ETH Zurich. While it was originally focused on open hardware (Pixhawk) and flight control (PX4) and produced a communication protocol (MAVLink) and ground control station (QGroundControl) "by accident" to support these, the project has set out in 2015 to tackle the next challenges: Vision based, GPS-denied flight and obstacle avoidance.

PX4 also made significant progress on VTOL flight control, including a full 3D simulation environment:

Which replicates the performance demonstrated in real flights outdoors:

This is just a brief summary. The full update is available on px4.io: Dronecode talk summary