OSS + ELC EU 2026

Autonomous VTOL aircraft require reliable, precision landing capabilities to enable real world applications from package delivery to infrastructure inspection. This session presents a complete open-source precision landing system built on ROS 2 and PX4, covering the full development lifecycle from high fidelity simulations to flight tested deployment.

We'll walk through how we developed, validated, and refined a multi-sensor perception and control stack that achieves centimeter-level landing accuracy using only commodity sensors and open-source tools. The system uses AprilTag fiducials for dock detection, fuses visible and infrared camera streams with a Kalman filter for robust pose estimation, and executes a phased descent state machine with real-time PID control.

The presentation covers:
Simulation first development: Building a Gazebo SITL environment with realistic sensor models
ROS 2 + PX4 integration: Bridging autopilot and perception via micro-XRCE-DDS,
Production deployment: Lessons learned scaling from lab prototype to field-tested hardware. Practical guidance on composing a production system from ROS packages, PX4 firmware, and community-contributed modules.