PX4 Developer Summit 2021

Corvus Robotics’ fleet of indoor drones are currently the only aerial robots in the world capable of persistent, infrastructure-free autonomous operation in large-scale industrial environments for months on end. Corvus One is our drone, which runs (fully onboard!) the Corvus Autonomy Engine, a software stack composed of a multi-camera vision pipeline, 3D motion planning pipeline, trajectory controller and embedded safety layer. Bulk of the high-level functionality is built on ROS1, while PX4 powers the embedded layer - guaranteeing a safety envelope for the vehicle and interfacing with low-level hardware. We’ll talk about the architecture, performance and sensing requirements for building such a safety-critical system operating around humans, other robots and heavy machinery, and why true hands-off autonomy is the only way to go for such a system. We’ll also share interesting (and completely unexpected) edge cases an autonomous system like ours has to deal with in production.