The joint Dronecode community of members and contributors is delighted to announce the release of PX4 1.8. This release marks a milestone in the development of the platform and hopes to bring stability and performance improvements. This release is also the first one to include significant autonomy improvements in VIO and obstacle avoidance. It took 1,755 commits with the help of 31 contributors and thousands of flight hours across all of our supported hardware platforms to finalize PX4 v1.8.
(The above Obstacle Avoidance demo is running on Intel® Aero Ready to Fly Drone.)
Main features and improvements
- Fusion of Visual Inertial Odometry in EKF2 (video)
- Interface for external Obstacle Avoidance systems (video)
- Significantly improved performance on racing drones (users need to reconfigure, link)
- Improved filtering and reduced control latency
- Added Airmode
- Improved flight performance on VTOL (Tiltrotors, Tailsitters)
- Support for building natively on Windows (link)
- Significant EKF2 improvements
- hardening of the estimator for situations where GPS accuracy is limited
- improved sensor selection logic enabling simultaneous use of optical flow and GPS
- added the EKF2_MAG_TYPE parameter for environments with high magnetic interferences
- Wind Estimator
- Support for structure scanning
- High Latency telemetry support (Iridium)
- Precision landing framework (including IRLock driver)
- Click here for the full list of changes
New Supported Hardware
The list of supported hardware keeps growing, we added support for the following hardware on this release:
- FMUv5: Pixhawk 4 and Pixhawk 4 mini from Holybro and Pixhack v5 from CUAV
- Crazyflie 2.0 with optical flow deck
- Omnibus F4 SD
- Snapdragon 8074 with VIO enabled (video, 820 support coming)
- IRLock sensor for precision landing
- ST LPS22HB barometer driver
- Analog devices IMUs (ADIS16477, ADIS16448)
- TeraRanger Evo 600Hz support
- Click here for the full list of supported hardware
Download
You can flash the v1.8.0 release from QGroundControl or download the binaries for your platform directly from the v1.8.0 release tag
Feedback
If you have any feedback you would like to share here are some options:
- Join us on Slack and as us on the #release channel
- Open an issue on Github
- Create a discussion on our forums
