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).

After flight, access your drone’s flight log to view the power consumption, CPU usage, vibration, temperature, etc. as well as see where your drone actually went.https://www.youtube.com/embed/nbQIHmfUtAQ?showinfo=0

Even a few proprietary drone platforms, like DJI, added support for QGroundControl, but what if you wanted to fly your drone with your own software, or what if you want to modify the drone that you bought with, I don’t know, frickin’ lasers?

Unless DJI lets your great new idea into their walled garden, you can’t. Just give up.

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. Then don’t give up, just go on.https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dz_EqdyXAX0?showinfo=0

We didn’t build this all by ourselves. Astral leverages available software to offer apps in our Drone App Store.

We added AI before it was cool (so a year ago). We took openness and ran with it. Astral can be your magic lamp. 🧞‍♂️