OSS + ELC EU 2026

PX4 and MAVSDK have made controlling individual drones remarkably accessible. Building systems around fleets, however, introduces a different class of challenges.

While developing a distributed multi-UAV architecture, we repeatedly discovered that many problems that initially appeared to be robotics problems were, in fact, distributed-systems problems. Task execution, telemetry aggregation, observability, fault tolerance, and fleet coordination quickly became more important than vehicle control itself.

This talk presents the architectural lessons that emerged from this work. It covers the separation of control and orchestration, the shift from commands to tasks, event-driven architectures, spatial state, and observability.

A recurring theme is that fleet management can be viewed as a space-time scheduling problem involving heterogeneous resources. From this perspective, many challenges beyond individual vehicles are problems of state, scheduling, and coordination.

The session connects PX4 and MAVSDK with ideas from distributed systems and scheduling theory, highlighting reusable patterns for scalable autonomous systems.