PX4 v1.7 Released
The release delivers numerous major features, including
- Experimental support for ROS2-like setups with FastRTPS.
- Support for many new sensors (LIDAR, airspeed, IMU, etc)
- Significant robustness improvements and new features to default estimation system (EKF2)
- Significant improvements to VTOL flight control
- Increased smoothness of multi-copter flight control
- Better performance of fixed-wing flight control
- Many build system improvements (including 50% faster Nuttx builds)
- New continuous integration system (http://ci.px4.io) with significantly more build and testing capacity
- Reduced CPU load and RAM usage
- Plus more tons of minor bug fixes and under the hood enhancements
Click here for the full release announcement and changelog.
China Roadshow
The DroneCode China Roadshow 2017 was a great success!
We had a number of fantastic workshops in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing. We met up with hundreds of drone users, students, and developers and learned a lot more about how we can better serve our Chinese community.
We also met with many local companies – we’re very excited to announce that we’ve signed up a number of new members as a direct result, and we are going to grow our efforts in China for 2018, we will be back with new events next year.
Click here to read the full China 2017 report.
Meet our new members:
A high-tech company providing R & D, production and OEM services. CUAV develops products including flight controllers, GPS positioning systems, wireless data links, and many more. CUAV wants to get more involved with PX4 and devote more development to the platform, they are providing test hardware to our test teams and developers.
Holybro wants to provide hardware and R&D production services to the Dronecode Platform. They develop and supply competitively priced UAV products to exacting quality standards. Products include flight controllers, GPS systems, telemetry radios and other peripherals.
Sky Drone joined because they want to support the Dronecode Platform from which they depend for their Sky Drone FPV (Celluar based). Sky Drone supply low-latency digital FPV cameras that communicate over 4G / LTE cellular networks.
Manufacture modern aerial robotic aviation platforms including helicopters with intelligent flight control systems. Ziyan believes in Open Source software, they want to support the Dronecode Platform and enable it in their hardware.
Contributions
This month the project pulse shows we’ve merged 86 PRs (-1) and closed 60 issues (+8). 6341 lines were added and 25015 were deleted. We also published PX4 v1.7.
Flight Testing
These are the flight testing stats since the last newsletter (Nov 01 – December 16):
- 226 commits tested.
- 1457 total flights.
- 31 daily flights (average).
- 0 major issues found.
- 7 releases tested
- 7 PR’s
- https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/pull/8276
- https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/pull/8325
- https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/pull/8340
- https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/pull/8343
- https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/pull/8384
- https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/pull/8412
- https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/pull/8418
- 16 vehicles total.
