An AI Open Ecosystem for Drones

8 min read

Do you remember when AOL tried with its walled garden to compete with the Internet?

Or when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and said there will never be an App Store?


There are benefits to a closed, proprietary system, but less so in the robotics industry of heterogeneous devices and software, when an open ecosystem is crowdsourced to be greater than what any tech giant can build on its own.


Well what if - dreaming big now - you wanted to run a mobile+cloud+simulator for a drone that you built with off the shelf parts, but first try it out in a simulator, and also use AI for features like computer vision and LLM reasoning? Not unless you have a magic lamp, or Astral.


For example, PX4 is a popular robotics platform, with many features.

PX4's focus is on solutions for human pilots, and we at Astral apply its strengths to autonomous robots.


Using Astral, you can pre-flight and configure your drone: set the flight path with QGroundControl.This works for many robots, not just flying robots, and not just quadcopter robots you buy from us. (We also support PX4's competitor open-source platform, ArduPilot).