Unmanned Aerial Systems Controller
Unmanned Aerial Systems Controller (UASC) was initially developed for a robotic competition, "Deep Drone Challenge 2020", organized by a startup incubator BrigkAir and Airbus. It allowed us to ease the control of the drone and focus on the important part — winning the competition.
The main motivation for UASC is to make the programming of an autonomous aerial fleet as easy as possible. A user does not have to worry about the technology behind the drone in use, proper simulation setup, differences between various platforms, etc. Instead, a user only specifies the behavior, and UASC takes care of the rest. From a technical perspective, UASC is a set of APIs, together with various front-end, back-end, and platform-specific applications.
Distributed system with centralized management
Drones are by nature distributed, they work in different places, and each one has its computer on board. UASC introduces a central point of management without making any assumptions about where the decisions are made — the instructions given to the drone can come from the pilot, a program running on board, or a sophisticated neural network running in the cloud.
Technology agnostic
Python, C++, RUST, Linux, JavaScript, Haskell, Mac, Prolog, Java, Turing machine, Windows, Lambda Calculus — with the huge number of different programming technologies and individual preferences for and against them, agreeing on a specific one is hard. For UASC, the choice is not relevant! Each component can be developed with different technology, all working together thanks to our flexible communication protocols.
Highly tunable
The technology is developed from scratch by us, and we can tune each component to work optimally for the application at hand. This includes customized visualizations, optimizations for latency, requirements related to data storage restrictions, etc.
Award-winning performance
Robotic competitions present their unique challenges: short deadlines, use cases pushing the boundaries of technology, and constantly changing requirements. Thanks to the design of UASC, we were able to cope with these challenges and win the first prize in the Drone Bot Challenge organized by Brigk Air and Airbus.