MAVLink founder and Dronecode Chair Dr. Lorenz Meier has published an initial draft of MAVLink-M, an open extension of the MAVLink protocol aimed at the demands now being placed on uncrewed systems by industry and government programs around the world. The Dronecode Foundation is forming a working group to steward it. The draft reaches into areas MAVLink was not originally designed to cover: richer representation of the operating environment, coordination across multiple platforms, stronger assurances around authorization and identity, and a shared vocabulary for the data that matters most to the people building and operating these systems. What the final shape of those messages looks like, and how far the specification extends, is for the working group to decide.
Why a working group, and why now
MAVLink is the most widely adopted messaging protocol for open source uncrewed systems and the foundation of modern aerial autonomy. Requirements for more capable uncrewed systems are converging across industry and government programs, and vendors are beginning to add proprietary extensions to MAVLink to meet them. Left unmanaged, that path leads to incompatible forks, duplicated integration effort, and interoperability gaps that slow development and divide work across the sector.
MAVLink itself avoided that outcome because it has been maintained in the open, under neutral governance, for more than a decade. MAVLink-M deserves the same treatment. Stewarded by the Dronecode Foundation, which already maintains MAVLink, the working group will keep the specification coherent, reduce integration effort, and close the interoperability gaps that have held the sector back. MAVLink-M is forward-compatible by design: every existing MAVLink implementation continues to work unchanged, and the decade of ecosystem built on MAVLink carries forward intact.
What the working group will do
The working group’s role is governance: taking the draft from its current form to a stable, openly governed specification that the ecosystem can build on. Concretely, it will:
- Review and ratify the specification under Dronecode Foundation governance.
- Define the release, versioning, and deprecation process, aligned with how MAVLink itself is maintained.
- Establish contribution rules and a transparent review process for future changes.
- Coordinate with reference implementations to keep the specification implementable and grounded in real integrations.
- Expand scope as the ecosystem’s needs evolve.
The goal is a single, coherent specification the industry can rely on, maintained in the open.
Participation
The working group will kick off in person on May 7, 2026, in Washington, D.C., as part of Auterion Forge. We thank Auterion for hosting and sponsoring the event and for bringing the ecosystem together in one room. The Dronecode Foundation’s morning programming is vendor-neutral and open to all registered attendees.
The morning will run in two sessions. The first is aimed at program leads, integrators, and decision-makers, and focuses on the case for an open MAVLink-M standard and the governance model that should underpin it. The second is aimed at engineers working on systems that will implement the specification, and is a working discussion of the draft itself and the path from draft to ratified standard. Further details will be shared closer to the event.
Working group seats are reserved for Dronecode Foundation members. The Foundation will reach out to the members best positioned to contribute, based on active involvement in the MAVLink ecosystem and shipping products that depend on it, and members may also express interest directly by contacting Dronecode Foundation General Manager Ramón Roche at rroche@linuxfoundation.org. Companies that are not yet members and want a seat at the table are encouraged to join the Foundation.
