What's New This Year at the PX4 DevSummit?

To celebrate drone month at Hackster, we will be heading to Austin, Texas and joining the PX4 Developer Summit 2022 on June 23rd-24th.

The PX4 Developer Summit is the annual flagship conference hosted by the Dronecode Foundation for the drone development community. Hackster has been a media partner and supporter since its inception in 2018 and we are excited to be attending the event in person this year!

The event is designed for software developers, hardware engineers, system integrators, and academia to explore together the latest technologies in the aerial robotics ecosystem. The summit covers a wide range of open source projects topics, including:

• PX4 Autopilot
• Pixhawk
• MAVLink
• MAVSDK
• ROS 2
• UAVCAN
• QGroundControl

The Hackster team is very excited about this year's stellar speaker line-up. Here are our top staff picks:

Open Robotics x PX4

Katherine Scott, developer advocate at Open Robotics & Tully Foote, platform manager at Open Robotics will each present a session at the summit.

Scott's talk will discuss recent software releases in the ROS community. Topics addressed will include ROS 2, Gazebo, hardware acceleration, Space ROS, and a variety of recent package releases.

Tully Foote, platform manager at Open Robotics, has 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. Foote has worked on a range of systems for indoor, outdoor, marine, aviation, and space. Two creations he’s known for are the tf transform library and the TurtleBot.

ROS has been used onboard drones with PX4 for many years, however it has generally been used outside of the safety critical subsystems. As drones get more complex with more advanced capabilities being integrated into the safety critical systems the value of leveraging ROS inside those systems is increasing. To better support this use case, there are several current, ongoing, and future efforts to enable ROS. Foote's session will cover those efforts and how they relate to the PX4 community.

NASA x PX4

Researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are actively conducting sUAS flight operations to develop/evaluate advanced technologies, concepts of operation, and human roles for the envisioned future of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and emergency response. PX4 have become core components within this research environment. Two aerospace engineers from NASA will provide a glimpse into NASA technologies built with PX4 capabilities (QGroundControl) and NASA technologies developed to integrate with PX4 capabilities (MAVLink, PX4). The areas of research being studied with these technologies include human factors, BVLOS/remote operations, and advanced automation. Learn more about the session here.

Auterion x PX4

Auterion's CEO & founder Lorenz Meier will be keynoting the event, and the team brought five technical sessions spanning a range of technical deep dives:

• Open standards and hardware integration workshop with Thomas Debrunner will cover how to integrate new hardware components and add board support using Pixhawk standards.
• PX4 and the art of custom MAVLink messages by Hamish Willee will be talking about the design of the communications protocol MAVLink, and how to add it to PX4 and its verification process.
• Auterion's AiNode - adding super computer performance to your FMU by Markus Achtelik will cover how NVIDIA® Jetson Xavier™ NX works as the AI brain on drones and its developer tools.
• Robust path following guidance for flying in strong winds by Thomas Stastny dive into the newly implemented flight algorithms for safe flight behaviors.
• The new dynamic mixing system of PX4 with Beat Kung & Silvan Fuhrer will cover the architecture of the actuation/control parameters and user interface.

Microsoft x PX4

Microsoft AirSim is a simulation platform that enables you to build increased autonomy into your aerial agent’s missions. With AirSim, you can use Unreal Engine or Unity to simulate drone’s environment, physics, sensors with PX4 for flight control.

Paul Stubbs, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft, will be speaking on how to get started with AirSim and PX4.

NXP x PX4

Three NXP engineers will be participating in the summit to talk about advanced systems engineering topics on mobile robotics. There will also be HoverGames 3 demos!

ModalAI x PX4

James Strawson, lead roboticist at ModalAI, will discuss how to leverage computer vision techniques to help solve a diverse set of challenges in building autonomous, aerial robots, such as localization, collision prevention, and navigation.

Want to learn more about ModalAI? Remember we have a Hackster Cafe with ModalAI's CEO Chad Sweet coming up on June 7th. Subscribe to the episode here!

Holybro x PX4

Holybro will be presenting the all-new flight controllers based on the FMUv6X and FMUv6C Pixhawk standard.

🎁 Remember we have three lucky winners this month, who will receive a Holybro drone kit with the new flight controllers! 🚀 Stay tuned and follow our social media as we announce more details!

❤️❤️

Lastly, join my talk! For those of you who don't know me, I'm Akshata from Pune, India. I'm a PX4 ambassador and currently a research intern at Hackster.

As a PX4 ambassador, I'm debuting a short tutorial for junior developers and developers on "how to get started with drone development without hardware."

This talk is for all of you who are living with the grief of not having a drone or for those of you who have been overwhelmed by the plethora of content out there on how to get started. I’ll take you right from what’s PX4 to simulating some really cool stuff all without the use of any hardware. I'd love to thank both Dronecode Foundation and Hackster for all the opportunities and support they’ve given so I can create this content for the developer community out there.

Joining us at the event? Use our discount code PX422HAC20 to get 20% off your ticket!