The PX4 Developer Summit came to Prague this October, and for the first time in years the PX4 community returned to Europe. Both the PX4 Developer Summit and PX4 itself was born at ETH Zurich, so bringing the summit back to the continent felt like a homecoming.
From October 7 to 9, the summit ran as track ran inside Open Source Summit Europe at the Prague Congress Centre. Over two packed days, 24 sessions covered everything from the inner workings of EKF2 to swarms, and on Thursday night nearly 100 people celebrated together at an amazing after party.
Where the Ecosystem Is Heading
Ramon Roche, Executive Director of the Dronecode Foundation, opened the track Thursday morning with the Community Update, covering where PX4, Pixhawk, MAVLink, MAVSDK, and QGroundControl stand today and what the community has shipped since Minneapolis. This year alone has seen PX4 v1.17, QGroundControl v5.1, and MAVSDK v4 releases packed with new features, important updates, bug fixes, and quality of life improvements.
Some of the week’s most important work happened off stage. The maintainers of the PX4 ecosystem projects held a successful in-person meeting where they discussed the future of each project and mapped out where it goes next.
The Sessions
OSS Summit started on Wednesday PX4 track ran on Thursday and Friday. Deep dives into the flight stack from the PX4 dev team shared the room with new silicon, swarm research, security work, and field reports from people flying PX4 onto live power lines and up to offshore wind turbines.
Thursday, October 8
- Community Update with Ramon Roche, Dronecode Foundation
- Fleet-Scale Bug Hunting in PX4 with Alexander Lerach, Auterion
- Learning To Navigate: Challenges of RL With PX4 as a Real-Time Controller with Kyrillos Adeeb, NXP
- From Observing To Working: PX4-Powered Aerial Manipulators with Ayham Alharbat, Saxion University / University of Twente
- Flying a Drone Onto a High Voltage Power Line with Mads Bornebusch, Heimdall Power
- MAVLink: State of the Nation with Hamish Willee, Auterion
- Serial Passthrough in PX4: Accessing FC Serial Ports Over MAVLink with Philipp Engljähringer, Auterion
- State of MAVSDK with Julian Oes, Julian Oes Consulting
- SIH: A Flight Simulator That Lives Inside the Autopilot with Marco Hauswirth, Auterion
- Keep It in the Air: Surviving Motor Failures in PX4 with Gennaro Guidone, Auterion
- From Gazebo Simulation To Flight Operations: Developing a Production Precision Landing System with Andrei Cuenca, Censys Technologies
- An Open-Source PX4 Swarm With Onboard ESP32-P4 Vision with Mindaugas Jonauskis, Team Mach Mind
Friday, October 9
- Pairing PX4 and ROS 2 Through Micro XRCE-DDS and Zenoh-pico, a Comparison with Beniamino Pozzan, Archangel Autonomy
- Cryptographic Flight Security: Implementing Hardware-Enforced FAA Remote ID and Trusted Identities with Ashok Kumar, gotoashok
- Why Switch To External Flight Modes? with Dawid Rudy, Auterion
- A Tour of the New EKF2 with Mathieu Bresciani, Auterion
- Adding ESP32/Xtensa Silicon and Custom Boards To PX4 with Henry Kotzé, AutonoSky
- PX4 on Open Silicon: Flight Control and AI Workloads on Multi-Core RISC-V with Afonso Oliveira, AiNekko
- The PX4 Airspeed Pipeline with Mahima Yoga, Auterion
- Total Energy Control: A Deep Dive Into TECS in PX4 with Silvan Fuhrer, Auterion
- VTOL Control Architecture – A Birds-eye View with Balduin Dettling, Auterion
- Infected Drones: How Compromised Autonomous Systems Pwn Ground Control Stations with Nick Aleks, ASEC
- Robotics Is Becoming Distributed Systems – Lessons Learned Building Multi-UAV Architectures with Pawel Sawicki, UfoCourier.com
- Self-Defending Swarms: MAVLink Signing Meets Peer-Consensus Exclusion Onboard PX4 with Yogesh Sardana, Airtel
The program covered a lot of ground. Talks went deep on state estimation, flight control, and simulation, and others looked at porting PX4 to new hardware, connecting it to ROS 2 and companion computers, and coordinating fleets and swarms. Security was a strong theme across both days, and several speakers shared lessons from flying PX4 in real-world operations.
The After Party at Bastion
On Thursday evening, October 8, the community took over Bastion, a garden restaurant right across from the Prague Congress Centre, for the PX4 Developer Summit After Party, hosted by the Dronecode Foundation and sponsored by Auterion. Braving the rain, almost 100 people came, from PX4 regulars to first-timers from across Open Source Summit. We also made a point of inviting our neighbors from the ELISA Project and Space Grade Linux.
Auterion covered the grill and the drinks, which gave everyone a relaxed evening to keep the week’s conversations going. It was a truly awesome night.
Thank you to Auterion for making it happen, and to everyone who showed up.
Thank You
Thank you to every speaker who submitted a talk and joined us in Prague to share it with the community. The track is only as good as the people on stage, and you made it a great one.
To Auterion, for sponsoring the after party, and to every Dronecode member and sponsor who helped bring the community to Prague.
To the Linux Foundation Events team, who once again ran registration, AV, room changes and speaker wrangling across a huge event and made it look easy.
And to everyone who attended to make it a truly special event in the history of PX4.
Three Chances to See Us in 2027 at Three Summits
Two stops in 2026 showed us the format works, so next year we’re going bigger. In 2027 the PX4 Developer Summit will run inside three Open Source Summit events:
- Open Source Summit North America in Vancouver, Canada, May 17–19, 2027
- Open Source Summit Europe in Glasgow, Scotland, September 20–22, 2027
- Open Source Summit Japan, December 6–8, 2027
That’s three continents and three chances to bring your work to the PX4 stage. Keep an eye on this blog and the Dronecode Discord for the Call for Proposals dates.
If you were in Prague, thank you for being there.
If you weren’t, pick a city. We’ll see you in 2027.
