Open-Source Drone Frameworks Beyond PX4 (URC Delivery Drone)¶
Notes¶
Summary¶
Context¶
Saddleback College Robotics is evaluating an aerial vehicle to assist the rover's Delivery Mission at the University Rover Challenge (Mars Society, MDRS, Utah) — a drone is optional but scores extra if it helps deliver objects to astronauts across rugged terrain. This is a GPS-available, outdoor, short-range, precision-delivery use case — different from the earlier agriculture/heavy-payload research (chinese_heavy_lift_drone_research.md), where PX4 was ruled out as too exploration/survey-oriented. Research scope note: keep this kind of research general/broad across the open-source drone space — not framed around what other competition teams specifically did.
Live GitHub data (pulled 2026-08-09 via GitHub API)¶
| Project | Stars | License | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| ArduPilot | 15,648 | GPL-3.0 | Flight controller firmware |
| PX4 | 12,365 | BSD-3-Clause | Flight controller firmware |
| Betaflight | 11,326 | GPL-3.0 | FPV racing firmware |
| INAV | 4,174 | GPL-3.0 | FPV/GPS nav firmware |
| dRonin (dRoninFlight active fork) | 1,509 | — | Flight controller firmware |
| Paparazzi UAV | 1,705 | GPL-2.0 | Research-oriented flight stack |
| MAVROS | 1,206 | — | MAVLink↔ROS2 bridge |
| Aerostack2 | 368 | BSD-3-Clause | ROS2 mission/autonomy framework |
| Crazyswarm2 | 246 | MIT | Crazyflie-specific swarm stack (not relevant here) |
| OpenPilot | 616 | — | Dead — last push 2015, do not build on this |
Recommendation¶
- Flight stack: ArduPilot — more stars/community than PX4, and its companion-computer precision-landing pipeline (ArUco marker detection → autonomous approach) is a near-exact fit for "deliver payload to a marked point."
- Mission/autonomy layer: MAVROS + Aerostack2 on ROS 2 — MAVROS as the MAVLink bridge, Aerostack2 for structured mission state-machine logic on top. Both work over ArduPilot or PX4, so a later switch wouldn't require a rewrite.
- Companion computer: Raspberry Pi 4/5 or Jetson Nano/Orin Nano running vision + the ROS2 stack, paired with a Pixhawk-class flight controller (turnkey PixC4-Pi / PixC4-Jetson combo boards exist for this).
- Betaflight/INAV ruled out — built for manual FPV control, wrong category for an autonomous payload-delivery mission.
Related¶
- Full report with sources/methodology:
open_source_drone_frameworks_urc_research.md(workspace root) - See
chinese_heavy_lift_drone_research.mdand Drone Companies - Distributor/Dealer Research for the separate agriculture/heavy-lift drone sourcing thread — different project, different requirements.