# ROS Aerial Robotics Community Interest Group


## Meeting Notes - April 2nd, 2026

Forum Post: https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/aerial-robotics-meeting-april-2nd-2026/53599

**Hosts**
* Kimberly McGuire
* Ramón Roche
* Mayank Joneja
* Alexis Guijarro

**Attendees**
* Rick Hernandez
* Rob Woolley
* Daniel Shown
* Ignacio González
* Kelvin Nguyen
* Varad Vaidya
* [fill in your name here]

## Agenda

* Announcements
* Events
* Latest developments
* Presentation
* Discussion (if time)
* Announcement next meeting

## Announcements

* We will have a co-lead change! [Mayank](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayank-joneja/) and [Alexis](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexis-guijarro/) will be handling the meetings from now on!

Ramon and Kim will step down :saluting_face: we will be regular citizens now. The group has been running for three years, since April 2023 right after ROSCon.

Ramon noted that Kim had been taking on more of the load recently and that both agreed this was the best path forward. Both will remain available to advise and participate as regular attendees.

Mayank leads flight systems at Airbound (delivery drones in India) and has been active in the group since day one. Alexis is an open source developer who has done board bring-up work for PX4 and 3DR, and has been heavily involved with the aerial robotics landscape documentation.

Kim will do a ROS Discourse post or blog post to mark the transition.

## Events (past and future)

### Future

* **Xponential 2026**
* May 11-14 2026 Detroit, USA
* https://xponential.org/
* **PX4 Developer Summit 2026 part 1**
* 18-20 May Minneapolis, USA
* Part of [Open Source Summit North America](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-north-america/)
* Full schedule expected on the PX4 website next week
* **ICRA 2026**
* June 1-5, Vienna Austria
* Workshops:
* [Digital Twins for UAV Autonomy: From Model-Based Design to Verified Deployment ](https://www.mathworks.com/company/events/tradeshows/icra-2026-5136850.html)
* [Aerial inspection for marine infrastructures](https://icra2026.aerialmaritimeinspection.com/)
* [AI-Driven Safe Aerial Robotics](https://aerial-robotics-workshop-icra.com/ )
* [Challenges and Opportunities of Neuromorphic Field Robotics and Automation](https://nfr-icra2026.com)
* **Multi-robot summer school**
* July 30th - August 8th, Prague, Czech Republic
* https://mrs.fel.cvut.cz/summer-school-2026/
* [The Multi-robot summerschool has all of their lecturers announced ](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7445102784250683392)
* Application deadline believed to be end of April

Still need to update these but will soon on the [aerial robotics landscape event page](https://ros-aerial.github.io/aerial_robotic_landscape/events/)

## New projects within the aerial robotics landscape

* No updates other than some URL fixes on the hardware page!
* If you'd like to see your project here make a PR!

https://ros-aerial.github.io/aerial_robotic_landscape

## Presentation

"Creating Cheap and Autonomous UAVs with Stanford's Largest Student-run UAV Club"

Kelvin Nguyen, Artash Nath and Anish Bayya from [Stanford Student Robotics Club](https://stanforduav.org/)

https://stanforduav.org/
https://stanfordssr.org/

### Club Overview

Stanford Student Robotics has 160+ students across seven teams. The drone team is the largest division with 50+ members, mostly undergraduates. The club was founded over 14 years ago to bring hands-on robotics experience to students whose classes are mostly theoretical. They run seminars teaching soldering, ROS, PyTorch, etc. Budget is under $300 per student per year — they 3D print all parts and buy from Amazon/AliExpress to keep costs down.

### Projects

**Sky Runners — Fixed-Wing Drone Delivery**
The largest project (~20-25 students). Building low-cost autonomous VTOL fixed-wing UAVs for campus delivery. VTOL configuration is 4-5x more efficient than quadcopters with ~100 km/h cruise speed. Stakeholders include Stanford's internal UAV committee and Stanford Hospital (medical helicopter coordination). Started with 3D-printed airframes (slow to rebuild after crashes), now moved to lifting-body foam-based aircraft. Built a custom wire foam cutter in-house for under $15k after quotes from Bay Area suppliers came in at $1-2k per wing. First foam prototype expected to fly in 1-2 weeks.

Also developing fleet management software with a MapBox 3D interface. Jetson Nanos with 4G control cards enable internet connectivity in flight, using REST APIs and websockets to connect to a backend server. MavLink UDP over 4G for control. Planning to scale to multi-drone autonomous flights over campus.

**Sky Beta — GPS-Denied Autonomous Quad**
Exploring cheap GPS-denied indoor autonomy. Uses a Pixhawk 6C flight controller with a Jetson Nano as the companion computer running ROS 2 (specifically Isaac ROS for GPU-accelerated packages like Isaac SLAM / Isaac VIO). Visual input from an OAK-D camera (using image data only, no IR — found the cheaper configuration sufficient). Communication between Jetson and Pixhawk via Micro XRCE-DDS. QGroundControl for comms, MavLink for base station. Drone cost is under $1k to build.

**High-Speed Racing Drone**
Started ~3-4 weeks ago. Goal: 350-400 km/h for at least 15 seconds. Powered by rotors in a rocket-like airframe. Each motor draws 120+ amps burst (vs. 60-70 amps on the larger fixed-wing). Uses a 12S (44-50V) battery custom-built to deliver 500-600 amps. 3D printed from nylon carbon fiber. Involves significant CFD work for airframe optimization, power management, and structural integrity. Target: flying in 4-5 months. Applications beyond defense include rapid medicine delivery and surveillance.

### Upcoming Events

**Drone Hacks** — Large intercollegiate student hackathon at Stanford in Fall 2026, in partnership with the Stanford Robotics Center. Teams from other universities will build autonomy software on ROS 2 / PX4-enabled drone kits provided by the club.

### Mentors & Advisors

The club benefits from mentors including a former 30-year NASA veteran (Van Delome), Steve Cousins (head of Stanford Robotics Center, founding board member of OSRF), and Jack Vertie (Gordian Knot Center at Stanford).

Questions:
* Ramon - How do you find time next to your classes? - We don't take classes anymore, projects are the main focus and classes are a complement.
* Daniel - How did you start? - Club went through a post-COVID recession. Started fresh with a small quadcopter ~2.5 years ago, grew from there.
* Kimberly - SkyBeta build instructions open source? - Work in progress, still iterating, once done and tested, plan to publish all code, SDK, print instructions and hardware open source.
* Alexis - If your platform is not reproducible, then the work is futile, how do you handle knowledge transfer? - Documentation - building internal automation tools for it, hands-on sessions teaching fresh students, open source components (Pixhawk, Jetson, cameras are all standard).
* Mayank - Usage of the OAK-D camera, how are you using the Jetson platform in your project? - All processing on the Jetson Nano. OAK-D's VPU found unreliable and power-hungry; still working on model quantization for it.
* Daniel - What does 2027 looks like? - We'd like to looking into refining swarm control with ~20 Sky Beta drones. And improved fixed-wings with autonomous campus flights. Novel GNC algorithms with super high speed drones. And more entrepreneurship!
* Cheppar - Any collaborations that are not stanford affiliates? Other unis yes, but can not do commercial collaborations due to Stanford regulations.
* Mayank - Suggestion to contribute a bill of materials to the aerial robotics landscape hardware page once projects are tested - Agreed, targeting fall.

_Notes where enhanced with claude and the transcripts_

## Discussion

* Mayank - What are topics that are underrepresented? We mostly talk about ArduPilot/PX4 since they use ROS but perhaps there are frameworks that we can also give a stage.
* Daniel - Swarms, digital twins and simulation (had more simulation talks ~2 years ago but not recently)
* Ramon - GPS-denied/indoor swarms, developer workflows and debugging approaches — how are people actually developing? What does the modify-rebuild-test cycle look like? What instrumentation do people use beyond printing logs and looking at simulation?
* Don't want to hear about — Log analysis/fleet management stuff (there's been a huge influx recently, especially with AI-assisted tools)
* Debugging approaches
* Mayank - Software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing — a lot of the documentation is outdated (old X-Plane, old RealFlight, primitive SITL). Would be exciting to see new developments, especially closing the loop on flight testing → blackbox logs → test cases → firmware development.
* Carlito - And maybe have a small subtopic on manufacturing pipelines for the new age embedded systems especially for smaller form factor drones
* Varad - Betaflight + ROS — SBUS RC via companion computer, kill switch? Currently individual labs have basic ROS support for Betaflight, but hacking the SBUS RC signal to send commands via companion computer removes the physical kill switch. Need safe ways to use Betaflight for autonomy. Betaflight controllers fill a gap between CrazyFlie-sized and full 5" FPV boards where autonomy options are lacking.

* Alexis - I started with the documentation with the aerial robotic landscape. I'd like to start a to do a renewal! Perhaps more automation, better design, additional resource types for different backgrounds. Currently only the autonomy stacks page has automation (a script checking GitHub repo release dates).

_Notes where enhanced with claude and the transcripts_

## Next meeting

On the 30th of April! Presentation and topic still to be determined.

Add the [ROS community event calendar ](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/embed?src=c_[e-mail]&ctz=UTC)to your calendar to see our planned meetings.
We also post an announcement [Aerial Vehicles category](https://discourse.ros.org/c/aerial-vehicles/14) on ROS discourse with the [wg-aerial-robotics tag](https://discourse.ros.org/tag/wg-aerial-robotics) about one week before the meeting starts.

<iframe src="https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/embed?src=c_[e-mail]&ctz=UTC" style="border: 0" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

### Want to nominate someone/yourself for a presentation?

Send us a message on the #aerial-robotics channel channel (link below) we are always looking for cool open source projects to spotlight.

**👉 Reach out to Mayank / Alexis.**

### Handy Links
* [ROS Discourse wg-aerial](https://discourse.ros.org/tag/wg-aerial-robotics)
* [ROS Aerial Community Github](https://github.com/ROS-Aerial)
* [#aerial-robotics Zulip Channel (Open Robotics Server)](https://openrobotics.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/526057-Aerial-Robotics)
* [Aerial Robotic Landscape](https://ros-aerial.github.io/aerial_robotic_landscape/)