OSS + ELC EU 2026: Full Schedule

7-9 October, 2026
Prague, Czechia
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Important Note: Timing of sessions and room locations are subject to change.

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10:50 CEST

Community Update - Ramon Roche, The Linux Foundation

Thursday October 8, 2026 10:50 - 11:10 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Speakers

Ramon Roche

Executive Director - Dronecode Foundation, The Linux Foundation

Thursday October 8, 2026 10:50 - 11:10 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

11:10 CEST

Fleet-Scale Bug Hunting in PX4 - Alexander Lerach, Auterion AG

Thursday October 8, 2026 11:10 - 11:30 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Running PX4 on thousands of devices surfaces errors that don't appear in lab testing or flight tests. The kind that only show up at a customer site, that you cannot reproduce locally, that disappear when you add or remove code in a completely unrelated module.

This talk presents real incidents from running PX4 at commercial scale: problem descriptions, how debugging was done, and how the errors were fixed.

For each incident we share the heuristics we use to quickly identify which part of the system to investigate, and the tools we use to diagnose Heisenbugs.

We conclude with the hardware CI setup we built, including hardware tracing capabilities and describe how this can help to catch certain kinds of failures described in this talk. In addition we describe how this can be shared with upstream.

Speakers

Alexander Lerach

Lead Embedded Software Engineer, Auterion AG

I am an embedded developer who likes working with microcontrollers and debugging low-level problems.

I previously worked in the automotive industry, where I developed a safe RTOS. Now, I enjoy writing drivers in PX4 and optimizing resource usage.

In my free time, I enjoy spending time in nature, especially hiking... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 11:10 - 11:30 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

11:40 CEST

Learning To Navigate: Challenges of RL With PX4 as a Real-Time Controller - Kyrillos Adeeb, NXP

Thursday October 8, 2026 11:40 - 12:00 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Training an RL policy with PX4 as a real-time controller is often considered impractical due to SITL limitations, communication overhead, and strict safety constraints. In this presentation, I will share how I addressed these challenges during my master’s thesis to successfully train a navigation and obstacle avoidance policy using Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab.
The talk focuses on the practical steps required to make PX4 compatible with unsupported simulators, including key preparations to enable stable SITL operation. I will discuss how to keep the PX4 SITL instance stable and continuously running throughout training.
Additionally, I will cover methods for accessing PX4 state and control interfaces via MAVLink and ROS 2, and highlight how PX4’s built-in safety layers can unintentionally block RL training. Finally, I will present strategies to work around these constraints while preserving system stability and realism.

Speakers

Kyrillos Adeeb

Robotics Integration Engineer, NXP

An enthusiast who loves robotics and autonomous systems where he could innovate and create better solutions for everyone.

Thursday October 8, 2026 11:40 - 12:00 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Any

12:00 CEST

From Observing To Working: PX4-Powered Aerial Manipulators - Ayham Alharbat, Saxion University / University of Twente

Thursday October 8, 2026 12:00 - 12:20 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Recently, drones have evolved from passive observers into active workers, enabling them to carry out physical work in the sky. This lightning talk shares recent advances in Aerial Manipulators (AM), where flying robots physically interact with their surroundings to perform tasks such as inspecting and maintaining offshore wind turbines.
We showcase how PX4 is accelerating the move from lab research to real-world deployment with the journey of a field test of our open AM framework, Sarax (github/sarax), physically interacting with a wind turbine by the North Sea (youtu.be/Er0f0A97aG8). Alongside it, we highlight two research threads (with references to our open-source HW/SW and PRs). First, a PX4/Pixhawk compliant open standard-interface for active, high-power payloads (e.g. manipulator with a steel brush for surface maintenance) to enable modular AM. Second, developing PX4-powered omnidirectional and actively tilting-rotor aerial robots that enable dexterous physical tasks in windy environments.
We close with next steps and open issues for PX4-powered aerial manipulators and an open invitation for the community to join forces and shape this future together.

Speakers

Ayham Alharbat

Robotics Researcher, Saxion University / University of Twente

Ayham Alharbat is a researcher at the Smart Mechatronics and Robotics Research Group in Saxion University of Applied Sciences and at the Robotics and Mechatronics Lab at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands. His research focuses on the modelling and control of Floating-body... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 12:00 - 12:20 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Any

13:50 CEST

Flying a Drone Onto a High Voltage Power Line - Mads Bornebusch, Heimdall Power

Thursday October 8, 2026 13:50 - 14:10 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Safely flying a drone close to high voltage power lines is a challenge. Making contact with a power line to install hardware on it is even more challenging. The line generates strong electromagnetic interference and there is no room for error in positioning.
In this talk we will go through the challenges we faced with positioning, magnetic interference and changing payload weight. We will show how tailoring the PX4 parameters can address these challenges and compare this to our experience using a DJI M600 where all problems have to be accounted for by our own specialized software. Finally we will present an open problem with RTK degradation resulting in sudden position jumps which we have currently handled in our own software.

Speakers

Mads Bornebusch

Head of Drone Development, Heimdall Power

Mads Bornebusch is Head of Drone Development at Heimdall Power, where he has spent 6 years building payloads for the DJI Matrice 600 Pro and Freefly Alta X that install sensors onto live high-voltage power lines. He works across the PX4 stack and ROS, adapting a commercial PX4 airframe... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 13:50 - 14:10 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

14:10 CEST

MAVLink: State of the Nation - Hamish Willee, Auterion

Thursday October 8, 2026 14:10 - 14:30 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

An update on MAVLink project and standardization: how we're aligning stakeholders around common definitions, why standardization takes as long as it does, and what PX4 is doing right now to be a better MAVLink citizen.

Speakers

Hamish Willee

Senior Technical Writer, Auterion

MAVlink co-ordinator, PX4 Dev Team maintainer (docs), ArduPilot Dev Team member.

Involved with drone communities since 2014, working with PX4, ArduPilot, QGC, Dronecode & MAVLink.
My work is fully funded by Auterion and entirely dedicated to open source drone projects... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 14:10 - 14:30 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Beginner

14:40 CEST

Serial Passthrough in PX4: Accessing FC Serial Ports Over MAVLink - Philipp Engljähringer, Auterion

Thursday October 8, 2026 14:40 - 15:00 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 v1.18 introduces a serialpassthrough driver that lets any MAVLink client read from and write to flight controller serial ports. This talk walks through the design: how SERIAL_CONTROL messages are mapped to hardware UART ports and, on STM32F7/H7 boards, to ESC signal pins via a software bit-bang UART; How reply routing, buffer management, and channel exclusivity are handled. We also cover the MAVLink↔UART bridge pattern that makes the feature usable from standard host-side tools, and the PASSTHRU_EN mechanism for safely handing off ESC signal pins at boot. Whether you need to debug a serial peripheral over a telemetry link, configure an ESC remotely, or build custom tooling on top of SERIAL_CONTROL, this talk gives you the full picture.

Speakers

Philipp Engljähringer

Embedded Software Engineer, Auterion

Philipp Engljähringer
Embedded Software Engineer, Auterion

I studied computer science at ETH Zurich and graduated last year. I now work at Auterion as an embedded software engineer and mostly focus on PX4. I enjoy building, debugging, flying, and crashing drones (mostly not intentionally) and developed the serial passthrough feature presented... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 14:40 - 15:00 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Any

15:00 CEST

State of MAVSDK - Julian Oes, Julian Oes Consulting

Thursday October 8, 2026 15:00 - 15:20 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

As a maintainer of MAVSDK I would like give an update on the current state of the project, specifically about changes and improvements coming with MAVSDK v4, such as:

- New lightweight Python wrappers
- New MavlinkDirect plugins
- And lots of improvements under the hood

Speakers

Julian Oes

Drone Software Consultant, Julian Oes Consulting

Julian Oes has been working on and around PX4 since its inception in 2012, at various companies and always as a maintainer of the various open source projects. Since 2022, Julian operates as a consultant / freelancer in the drone space. He works at the intersection between drone internals... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 15:00 - 15:20 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

15:50 CEST

SIH: A Flight Simulator That Lives Inside the Autopilot - Marco Hauswirth, Auterion AG

Thursday October 8, 2026 15:50 - 16:10 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Most PX4 simulation relies on an external simulator talking to the autopilot over a network bridge. SIH, the Simulator In Hardware, does the opposite: it is a single PX4 module that integrates the full rigid-body equations of motion right next to the flight stack. The same code runs as a SITL process on your laptop and, just as well, directly on the flight controller, feeding synthetic sensor data into the estimation pipeline while the board flies a virtual vehicle.

This talk opens up SIH and shows how little there is between you and a flying model: how actuator outputs become forces and torques, are integrated through the equations of motion, and are reconstructed into noisy IMU, baro, GNSS, and airspeed signals that the rest of PX4 cannot tell from real hardware. We cover the vehicle types supported, the aerodynamic model that makes adding an airframe a matter of physics rather than plumbing, and how to launch, run, and extend SIH.

Speakers

Marco Hauswirth

GNC Engineer, Auterion AG

2024 – present: GNC Engineer at Auterion with a focus on State Estimation. Upstream PX4 development and customizations for clients
2023 - 2024: Research engineer for GNSS-denied drones using radar sensors at ETH Zurich – ASL
2021-2023: Masters degree in Robotics, Systems, and... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 15:50 - 16:10 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

16:10 CEST

Keep It in the Air: Surviving Motor Failures in PX4 - Gennaro Guidone, Auterion

Thursday October 8, 2026 16:10 - 16:30 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

What if losing a motor didn't mean losing the drone? This talk gives an end-to-end overview of how PX4 handles motor failure on multicopters: how it recognizes a failing motor, and the failsafe and control-allocation responses that decide what happens next.
We'll then look at where motor-failure handling is heading: a new filter-based detection method that learns each motor's expected behavior to catch faults earlier, the tooling to calibrate it from real flight data, and a recovery that can keep a vehicle flying, and bring it home, after losing a motor.

Speakers

Gennaro Guidone

Autonomous Flight Systems Intern, Auterion

I am an MSc student in Robotics at ETH Zurich and an intern at Auterion. Born in Naples, I previously served as a Research Assistant at the Robotics and Perception Group under Prof. Scaramuzza. My core professional interests lie in drones, AI, and applied optimization.

Thursday October 8, 2026 16:10 - 16:30 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Any

16:40 CEST

From Gazebo Simulation To Flight Operations: Developing a Production Precision Landing System - Andrei Cuenca, Censys Technologies

Thursday October 8, 2026 16:40 - 17:00 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

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.

Speakers

Andrei Cuenca

Senior Autonomy Engineer, Censys Technologies

Dr. Andrei Cuenca is an Aerospace Autonomy Engineer at Censys Technologies Corporation, where he leads GNC development for autonomous UAS. He holds a PhD and MS in Aerospace Engineering from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and dual BS degrees in Mechanical and Electronics Engineering... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 16:40 - 17:00 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Advanced

17:00 CEST

An Open-Source PX4 Swarm With Onboard ESP32-P4 Vision - Mindaugas Jonauskis, Team Mach Mind

Thursday October 8, 2026 17:00 - 17:20 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

I want to share our bumpy road on Swarm Drone Challenge 2026 (ILA Berlin) with a team of two people and what two stubborn guys can achieve during weekends - 4th place. We built a swarm of 5 drones, each running PX4 for flight, coordinated by a ROS2 ground station and onboard with two ESP32-ser. microcontrollers. ESP32-P4 was dedicated to onboard ArUco vision and ToF obstacle sensing (no Linux SBC) and an ESP32-S3 handling MAVLink and micro-ROS comms over WiFi.

I will cover architecture — PX4 + MAVLink + a ROS2 commander that assigns swarm roles and streams waypoints — and the onboard vision pipeline on bare microcontrollers. Comparison of Version 1.0 (single-MCU) vs Version 2.0 (dual-MCU) and why we shipped a deterministic Manhattan-grid navigation fallback when ArUco-EKF localization could not be deployed in time.

Our solution was open-sourced - https://github.com/machmind-dev/drone-swarm-challenge-2026

Speakers

Mindaugas Jonauskis

Co-Founder & Embedded Systems Engineer, Team Mach Mind

I'm co-founder of Mach Mind, a two-person team building autonomous drones in our spare time. At the 2026 Swarm Drone Challenge (ILA Berlin) we placed 4th with an open-source 5-drone PX4 swarm that runs onboard vision on bare ESP32 microcontrollers — no Linux SBC. By day I'm an embedded/systems... Read More →

Thursday October 8, 2026 17:00 - 17:20 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

11:05 CEST

Pairing PX4 and ROS 2 Through Micro XRCE-DDS and Zenoh-pico, a Comparison - Beniamino Pozzan, Archangel Autonomy

Friday October 9, 2026 11:05 - 11:25 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Since Micro XRCE-DDS replaced Fast-RTPS in PX4 version 1.14 the support for direct communication between ROS 2 and PX4 never stopped improving.
With PX4 stable version 1.17 recently released and version 1.18 close to enter its beta testing phase this presentation aims to cover the latest changes, imporvents and limitations of the Micro XRCE-DDS and Zenoh-pico interfaces.
The presentation will also compare the two communication methods to give the audience all the information necessary to choose the best approach given their requirements and application contraints.

Speakers

Beniamino Pozzan

Senior Robotics Engineer, Archangel Autonomy

B. Pozzan is a PX4 Maintainer and Senior Robotics Engineer at Archangel Autonomy. He has extensive experience integrating autopilots with ROS 2 for UAV control and GNSS-denied navigation. With a Ph.D. in Automation Engineering from the University of Padova, he has extensive experience... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 11:05 - 11:25 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Any

11:25 CEST

Cryptographic Flight Security: Implementing Hardware-Enforced FAA Remote ID and Trusted Identities - Ashok Kumar, gotoashok

Friday October 9, 2026 11:25 - 11:45 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Global regulatory shifts—driven by strict NDAA requirements and EASA U-Space mandates—require drone manufacturers to implement verifiable supply chain security. Software-only implementations of FAA Remote ID remain vulnerable to key spoofing and firmware tampering. This session delivers a practical breakdown of how to enforce a hardware root of trust by embedding physical Secure Elements (like the OPTIGA Trust M) into open flight controllers running PX4 and NuttX.
We will bypass high-level concepts to dive straight into the embedded architecture:
Configuring the SPI/I2C bus interface between the flight MCU (PSoC C3M) and the security peripheral.
Modifying the NuttX driver layer to offload ECDSA signing keys for broadcast messages without blocking safety-critical flight loop threads.
Structuring secure boot sequences to protect downstream firmware from local physical exploits.
We will share timing benchmarks showing how to manage cryptographic latency within standard PX4 task frequencies to build compliant systems without sacrificing real-time flight performance.

Speakers

Ashok Kumar

Ashok Kumar, gotoashok

I am a Systems Architect and Embedded Engineer with a 26-year obsession: defining what actually constitutes 'good' design in an era of over-engineering. I operate at the high-stakes intersection of Silicon and Software, translating complex hardware capabilities into mission-critical... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 11:25 - 11:45 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Any

11:55 CEST

Why Switch To External Flight Modes? - Dawid Rudy, Auterion

Friday October 9, 2026 11:55 - 12:15 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

When it comes to controlling PX4 from a companion computer, developers are often spoiled for choice - leading to confusion about which architecture best suits their specific mission requirements. Historically, Offboard Mode has been the go-to default, but the evolution of the PX4 ecosystem has introduced powerful alternatives like External Flight Modes and the native ROS 2 Control Interface.
This session provides a technical breakdown of how PX4 handles companion computer inputs under both paradigms. We will explore how External Flight Modes register directly with PX4's internal mode manager, allowing custom autonomy apps to behave like native flight modes with built-in safety boundaries. Attendees will learn the differences between these methods, the performance benefits of moving to the ROS 2 bridge, and a practical migration path to transition legacy offboard code into robust, external ROS 2 applications.

Speakers

Dawid Rudy

GNC Engineer, Auterion

RC hobbyist and FPV drones enthusiast, actively contributing to UAV-related open-source projects.

Friday October 9, 2026 11:55 - 12:15 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

12:15 CEST

A Tour of the New EKF2 - Mathieu Bresciani, Auterion

Friday October 9, 2026 12:15 - 12:35 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

EKF2 is the heart of PX4's navigation, and over the past few years it has quietly received a series of improvements that make it more accurate, more robust, and easier to work with. In this talk I'll walk through the most significant ones. We'll start with a short recap of the filter's architecture, then cover the move to a proper error-state formulation, along with its symbolic derivation and code generation using SymForce. We'll then see how this makes it easy to add a new state or measurement, as we did for the terrain state. From there we'll turn to round-earth navigation, paired with a position-dependent gravity model, which replaces the flat-earth assumptions to support long-range and high-latitude flight. We'll also look at how the Joseph-stabilized covariance update not only makes the filter more numerically stable, but also lets us perform partial updates, which we rely on heavily in the magnetometer and optical-flow fusion. Finally, we'll look ahead at the next changes coming to EKF2 and some of the ideas we're exploring.

Speakers

Mathieu Bresciani

Staff GNC Engineer, Auterion

Mathieu Bresciani is a Flight Control Engineer specialized in Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC). Currently working at Auterion for the last 8 years, Mathieu spends most of his time improving and developing flight control algorithms for PX4. Member of the PX4 Dev Team, Mathieu... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 12:15 - 12:35 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

14:00 CEST

Adding ESP32/Xtensa Silicon and Custom Boards To PX4 - Henry Kotzé, AutonoSky

Friday October 9, 2026 14:00 - 14:20 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

This talk will introduce a new MCU architecture that PX4 only recently supported: the Xtensa ESP32. Using it as a walk-through, we'll demonstrate the software components needed to add your own custom board, contribute to or expand existing MCU architecture support, and highlight how PX4's compile process is designed to be agnostic to the underlying MCU architecture.

Some highlights will be:
How PX4 interacts with NuttX at a low level, and why that relationship is central to bringing up new hardware

The role of the High Resolution Timer (HRT) in PX4's timekeeping, and what it takes to implement it for a new architecture

The difference between Menuconfig and boardconfig, and when to use each when defining your board's peripherals and pin allocation

How PX4's build system sets up the compilation environment for NuttX, and how to configure it for your specific board

How PX4 is designed to be MCU-agnostic, and what that means in practice when working at the boundary between PX4 and NuttX

Speakers

Henry Kotzé

Lead Engineer, AutonoSky

Henry, from South Africa, holds an MSc in augmenting classical controllers with neural networks and aims to specialise in control systems and estimation. He has implemented airship controllers in PX4 and now works at Autonosky on drone solutions for GPS-denied environments. In his... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 14:00 - 14:20 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

14:20 CEST

PX4 on Open Silicon: Flight Control and AI Workloads on Multi-Core RISC-V - Afonso Oliveira, AiNekko

Friday October 9, 2026 14:20 - 14:40 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

While PX4 is open source, the underlying hardware often remains tied to proprietary vendor black boxes. This creates a gap for PX4 developers and sovereignty-sensitive applications that need an inspectable full stack all the way down to silicon.

This session presents CORE-ET, a fully open-source RISC-V platform that can scale from a 16-hardware-thread Erbium configuration to systems with more than 2000 cores. We will show a simulation demo of Erbium running PX4 alongside onboard AI: PX4/control runs on two hardware threads, while the remaining 14 run workloads such as vision, depth, VIO, or object detection.

We will discuss the porting structure, real-time capabilities, and measurements needed to show flight control running alongside local inference. The result is a path toward drones where both software and hardware are open and inspectable.

Speakers

Afonso Oliveira

Computer Engineer, AiNekko

Building RISC-V systems across specs, boot ROMs, HALs, emulators, firmware, RTOS, and OS. Currently at Ainekko, working full-stack on custom RISC-V AI accelerators. Previously at Synopsys, contributed to RISC-V tooling, specifications, Zephyr support, and ML quantization research... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 14:20 - 14:40 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

14:50 CEST

The PX4 Airspeed Pipeline - Mahima Yoga, Auterion

Friday October 9, 2026 14:50 - 15:10 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Airspeed sits at the center of fixed-wing flight. It determines how much lift the wings generate, how effective the control surfaces are, and ultimately how the aircraft can be controlled. As a result, it influences nearly every aspect of flight, from stability and maneuvering to energy management. Yet the airspeed value used throughout PX4 is far from a simple sensor reading. Behind a seemingly simple number lies a surprisingly large stack of sensor physics, conversions, calibration procedures, validation logic, control scaling, and TECS handling.

This talk traces the airspeed pipeline end-to-end: from pitot-tube measurements, through IAS → CAS → TAS conversion, in-flight calibration, and validation, to the controllers that ultimately use it. We'll also examine real-world failure modes from the PX4 community and show how to diagnose them from flight logs.

Speakers

Mahima Yoga

GNC Engineer, Auterion

A Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) engineer at Auterion with a focus on fixed-wing vehicles.

Friday October 9, 2026 14:50 - 15:10 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Any

15:10 CEST

Total Energy Control: A Deep Dive Into TECS in PX4 - Silvan Fuhrer, Auterion

Friday October 9, 2026 15:10 - 15:30 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

The Total Energy Control System (TECS) coordinates throttle and pitch to manage a fixed-wing vehicle's airspeed and altitude as a single energy problem — but for many users it remains a black box of tuning parameters. This talk opens it up.
We start from first principles, deriving how TECS balances kinetic and potential energy and why throttle and pitch are the natural levers to control them. We then cover the controller's concept, its architecture in PX4, a structured approach to tuning, and the shortcomings every operator eventually hits. Finally, we distill seven years of hands-on TECS tuning into the heuristics and hard-won insights that don't appear in the documentation.
Whether you're tuning your first fixed-wing or maintaining a fleet, you'll leave with a clearer mental model of what TECS is really doing.

Speakers

Silvan Fuhrer

GNC Engineer, Auterion

Flight control engineer with a particular focus on fixed-wing and VTOL applications.

Friday October 9, 2026 15:10 - 15:30 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Any

15:40 CEST

VTOL Control Architecture - A Birds-eye View - Balduin Dettling, Auterion

Friday October 9, 2026 15:40 - 16:00 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Is it a multicopter? Is it a fixed-wing? Not quite: It is a quantum superposition of both, and only upon flipping the transition switch we can observe the VTOL state with certainty.

VTOL vehicles bridge the design space between either pure vehicle type and enable long, efficient flights combined with accurate and soft landings. However, they challenge our software engineering and architecture skills, and properly supporting all VTOL vehicles in PX4 is quite the balancing act.

In this talk, we will go over the architecture and implementation decisions that connect those two vehicle types within a running system. We will visit some VTOL specific features and see where they slot in, and finally we will conclude with possible paths for further improving VTOL support in PX4.

Speakers

Balduin Dettling

GNC Engineer, Auterion

Balduin has found his enthusiasm for VTOL drones as a student and then controls engineer at TwingTec, an airborne wind energy startup coming out of ETHZ. While that company ironically lacked some runway, he has now found a home at Auterion, where he can improve the state of open source... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 15:40 - 16:00 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Advanced

16:00 CEST

Infected Drones: How Compromised Autonomous Systems Pwn Ground Control Stations - Nick Aleks, ASEC

Friday October 9, 2026 16:00 - 16:20 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

Modern drone operations have moved from one pilot, one aircraft to multi-agent autonomous fleets. Dozens and even hundreds of vehicles now fly missions while only a handful of operators supervise from the ground. More drones, fewer ground stations, and the station is where all the value is, the operator, the mission data, a full-blown OS, and even access to other drones.

For years, drone security researchers have focused on attacking the vehicle. I flip the target and show how a single infected drone becomes a beachhead, reaching up the command chain to own the very station meant to control it, and the fleet.

This research audited six popular independent ground-control and middleware projects across the MAVLink ecosystem, Mission Planner, QGroundControl, MAVSDK, MAVProxy, MAVROS, and DroneKit and found the same broken trust boundary in all of them. The result is 14 findings rooted in one systemic flaw, including two novel full remote code execution chains against the operator's own machine.

Speakers

Nick Aleks

Chief Hacking Officer, ASEC

Nick Aleks is a renowned cybersecurity researcher, engineer and author of Black Hat Bash, and Black Hat GraphQL, (as well as the upcoming Drone Hacker's Handbook). Nick Aleks founded ASEC (asec.io) and established DEFCON Toronto (DC416). He has spent over a decade spearheading cybersecurity... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 16:00 - 16:20 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

16:30 CEST

Robotics Is Becoming Distributed Systems - Lessons Learned Building Multi-UAV Architectures - Pawel Sawicki, UfoCourier.com

Friday October 9, 2026 16:30 - 16:50 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

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.

Speakers

Pawel Sawicki

Founder and CTO, UfoCourier.com

Pawel Sawicki is a Machine Learning Engineer and Software Architect with 15+ years of experience in distributed systems and AI. His work focuses on deep learning, LLM-based systems, and scalable agentic architectures. He combines hands-on experience with modern AI frameworks and cloud-native... Read More →

Friday October 9, 2026 16:30 - 16:50 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Intermediate

16:50 CEST

Self-Defending Swarms: MAVLink Signing Meets Peer-Consensus Exclusion Onboard PX4 - Yogesh Sardana, Airtel

Friday October 9, 2026 16:50 - 17:10 CEST

South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

This isn't just about Airtel but for every organisation as MAVLink has supported per-message signing since MAVLink 2, yet almost no real-world PX4 fleet enables it, because key distribution, rotation & revocation across dozens of airborne vehicles has no production-ready tooling, so most swarms still accept any correctly formatted command from whatever radio reaches them. A single spoofed ground station or one drone with cloned key can inject commands rest of swarm has no way to reject. Talk introduces swarm-native trust layer that issues short-lived, mission-scoped MAVLink signing keys from a lightweight onboard authority, lets every drone verify signatures independently without round-tripping to a ground station & adds a peer-consensus exclusion protocol so that if one drone starts broadcasting commands inconsistent with its own attested mission profile, the rest of swarm votes to ignore it mid-flight without operator intervention. We demonstrate this on PX4 SITL & real hardware over a Zenoh-based inter-drone link, show a live command-injection attack being rejected by consensus & discuss key rotation strategy under degraded or fully lost ground-station connectivity mid-mission.

Speakers

Yogesh Sardana

Deputy General Manager - AI & Cloud Engineering, Airtel

I'm working as a Cloud Engineering Leader & Researcher, leading Open Source Stack R&D wing, known as Jack of all trades, master of Cloud. Been into various tech stacks of Software Development Life Cycle, having fun with tech.

Friday October 9, 2026 16:50 - 17:10 CEST
South Hall 1 B (Floor 1)

PX4 Dev Summit

Audience Experience Level Any

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16:50 CEST

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