Minneapolis delivered. For the first time, the PX4 Developer Summit ran as a track inside Open Source Summit North America, sharing the venue with Linux, Cloud Native, AI/ML, Embedded Linux, and every other corner of the open source world. We came to plant the PX4 flag in the wider Linux Foundation universe, and the community showed up swinging.
Three days, ten sessions, a hands-on workshop spanning two slots, and a community that walked into rooms full of developers who had never touched a flight stack and walked out with new collaborators. That was the point. PX4 doesn’t live in a silo, and Minneapolis made that obvious.
Ecosystem Updates Worth Showing Up For
The community update from our General Manager Ramon Roche and PX4 Creator Lorenz Meier was, candidly, the talk that set the tone for the rest of the week.
Ramon shared a major shift in how Dronecode plans to support the projects going forward: we are bringing on paid maintainers, both full-time and part-time, across the Dronecode projects. Open source has carried PX4, Pixhawk, MAVLink, MAVSDK, and QGroundControl an enormous distance on volunteer energy alone, and the projects are now operating at a scale where sustained, funded maintenance is the right next step. More on this rollout in the coming months.
Dr. Lorenz Meier, our chairman, followed with a clear-eyed look at where the ecosystem is heading. Governments are showing serious and growing interest in PX4 for dual-use and defense contexts, and the demand is creating scaling opportunities that simply were not on the table a few years ago. Open source is reaching parts of the industry that previously assumed they had to build proprietary stacks. PX4 is the counterexample, and it’s growing fast.
The Sessions
The PX4 track at OSS Minneapolis ran across all three days. Here’s what shipped:
Monday, May 18
- DroneCode Community Update with Ramon Roche (Dronecode Foundation) and Lorenz Meier (Creator of PX4, Auterion)
- Leveraging GPU-accelerated Stereo Visual Inertial Odometry in PX4 Using ROS 2 with Andrew Brahim, Ascend Engineering
- QGC: What You Don’t Know with Andrew Wilkins, Ascend Engineering
Tuesday, May 19
- Sim-to-Flight: Why Starting With Simulation Is the Fastest Path To Successful Flight Testing with Anthony Comer (Oklahoma State University) and Eric Hillsberg (MathWorks)
- Multi-robot Air-Ground Collaboration With PX4 and Opportunistic Communications with Fernando Cladera, University of Pennsylvania
- Unified Autonomy Stack with Nikhil Khedekar and Kostas Alexis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
- Talking To Drones: Natural Language Control of PX4 Using a Phone, MCP, and ChatGPT Realtime API with Godfrey Nolan, RIIS LLC
- Enhancing PX4’s EKF2 Replay Module for Deterministic Integration Testing with Brian Fairservice and Kerry Snyder, KEF Robotics
Wednesday, May 20
- Building Autonomy on PX4: A Hands-On Workshop for Embedded and Robotics Developers with Ramon Roche (The Linux Foundation) and Nuno Marques (Drone Solutions), running across two slots
Academic and industry submissions side by side, exactly the mix we hoped for.
The UVify Light Show
The single image that defined Minneapolis: a synchronized drone light show over the city, run by UVify, who also sponsored OSS Summit. It was the kind of moment that reminds you why people get into this field in the first place. A few hundred drones, perfectly choreographed, doing the thing that only happens when the autopilot, the comms, the planning, and the operators all work.
Thank you to UVify for both the sponsorship and the spectacle. Outstanding work.
Thank You to Our Sponsors
A specific shoutout to UVify for sponsoring Open Source Summit and putting on the drone light show that the entire event is still talking about.
And thank you to every member and sponsor who showed up in Minneapolis. The track exists because the community funds it, builds for it, and shows up to argue about it in the hallway afterwards.
Thank You to the LF Events Team
The Linux Foundation Events crew ran a tight ship. Registration, AV, room transitions, speaker wrangling, signage, the works. None of this happens at this scale without them, and they made it look easy.
See You in Prague
The 2026 cycle isn’t done. The PX4 Developer Summit returns at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague, 7 to 9 October 2026, and the Call for Proposals is open now. If Minneapolis was about introducing PX4 to the wider Linux world, Prague is about doing it again with everything we learned.
If you were in Minneapolis, thanks for being there.
If you weren’t, Prague is your shot.
