Microsoft is excited about our participation in the PX4 Summit hosted by Dronecode Foundation.
Last year, Microsoft announced that we were joining Dronecode as a Gold Member and we have since been investing in mutual collaboration efforts to help the drone industry accelerate.
Drones are rapidly becoming a critical tool for businesses and first responders. Drones perform inspection across structures like wind turbines, buildings, farms and factories. Drones also impact the way industries move goods, such as e-commerce purchases, organs and medical supplies, as well as the delivery of packages and cargo to people in both urban and depopulated areas.
PX4, the largest commercially adopted open-source flight control stack, enables all these scenarios, bringing innovation and the power of developing autonomous drone solutions by a vibrant community. Dronecode helps nurture the open-source communities, guides project governance and provides infrastructure and critical services to mass adoption as part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation.
At the upcoming PX4 Summit, Microsoft will talk about the role of autonomous systems and simulations in the drones space and about the possibility to design, develop and run simulations at scale using Microsoft Azure. We will also demonstrate how to build an inspection drone solution using PX4, QGroundControl, ROS2 and AirSim.
“Since Microsoft joined the Dronecode Foundation last year, we have had a fantastic collaboration momentum on the integration of AirSim for the PX4 Autopilot ecosystem,” said Dr. Lorenz Meier, chairman of Dronecode, CEO of Auterion and founding author of PX4, MAVLink, QGC and Pixhawk. “We will sustain the joint force together in creating the largest commercially adopted open-source flight stack for many industrial applications.”
Airsim, the Microsoft open-source simulator for drones, robots and more, recently surpassed 10,000 followers in GitHub.
“The integration between Airsim and the PX4 ecosystem brings tremendous potential for the industry,” said Guada Casuso, Principal Product Manager of Microsoft Autonomous systems. “Real-world simulations at scale will play a key role in this journey, and we are extremely happy for the continuous partnership with Dronecode and the larger PX4 ecosystem.”
PX4 Developer Summit is the annual flagship conference hosted by Dronecode for the drone development community. With over 5,000 members around the world, the PX4 ecosystem is the largest open source community for drones. This year, the event will be entirely virtual with free registration. The event has curated content from autopilot software engineering, SDK development, simulation and testing, middleware, regulatory and more.
Check out all the talks from the conference at https://px4.io/virtual-2020/
Top photo is an ALTA X Pro by Freefly Systems. Thank you to Jinger Zeng and Ramon Roche from PX4, who supported this collaboration and helped to create this blog post.
Paul Stubbs is a Director of AI + Innovation Marketing for Microsoft, focusing on autonomous systems such as vehicles, drones and industrial robotics.
