The autopilot stack the industry builds on.

About

PX4 is an open-source autopilot stack for drones and unmanned vehicles. It supports multirotors, fixed-wing, VTOL, rovers, and many more experimental platforms from racing quads to industrial survey aircraft. It runs on NuttX, Linux, and macOS. Licensed under BSD 3-Clause.

Why PX4

Modular architecture. PX4 is built around uORB, a DDS-compatible publish/subscribe middleware. Modules are fully parallelized and thread safe. You can build custom configurations and trim what you don’t need.

Wide hardware support. PX4 runs on a wide range of autopilot boards and supports an extensive set of sensors, telemetry radios, and actuators through the Pixhawk ecosystem.

Developer friendly. First-class support for MAVLink and DDS / ROS 2 integration. Comprehensive SITL simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and log analysis tools. An active developer community on Discord and the weekly dev call.

Vendor neutral governance. PX4 is hosted under the Dronecode Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. Business-friendly BSD-3 license. No single vendor controls the roadmap.

Supported Vehicles

Multicopter

Fixed Wing

VTOL

Rover

_{…and many more: helicopters, autogyros, airships, submarines, boats, and other experimental platforms. These frames have basic support but are not part of the regular flight-test program. See the full airframe reference.}

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot.git --recursive
cd PX4-Autopilot
make px4_sitl

[!NOTE] See the Development Guide for toolchain setup and build options.

Documentation & Resources

Community

• Weekly Dev Call — open to all developers (Dronecode calendar)
• Discord — Join the Dronecode server
• Discussion Forum — PX4 Discuss
• Maintainers — see MAINTAINERS.md
• Contributor Stats — LFX Insights

Contributing

We welcome contributions of all kinds — bug reports, documentation, new features, and code reviews. Please read the Contribution Guide to get started.

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file

Contributing to PX4 Firmware

We follow the Github flow development model.

Fork the project, then clone your repo

First fork and clone the project project.

Create a feature branch

Always branch off main for new features.

git checkout -b mydescriptivebranchname

Edit and build the code

The developer guide explains how to set up the development environment on Mac OS, Linux or Windows. Please take note of our coding style when editing files.

Commit your changes

Always write descriptive commit messages and add a fixes or relates note to them with an issue number (Github will link these then conveniently)

Example:

Change how the attitude controller works

- Fixes rate feed forward
- Allows a local body rate override

Fixes issue #123

Test your changes

Since we care about safety, we will regularly ask you for test results. Best is to do a test flight (or bench test where it applies) and upload the logfile from it (on the microSD card in the logs directory) to Google Drive or Dropbox and share the link.

Push your changes

Push changes to your repo and send a pull request.

Make sure to provide some testing feedback and if possible the link to a flight log file. Upload flight log files to Flight Review and link the resulting report.