Embedded rust autopilot runs fast flight control on microcontroller
Cybflight: An Embedded Rust Autopilot for Aerial Robotics Research
Robotics
Summary
Flying drones with advanced control often needs extra computers or complicated setups. The authors present Cybflight, a software system written in Rust that runs all the key autopilot tasks—like sensing, planning, and steering—directly on a small, low-power flight controller chip. This approach keeps the software modular and efficient, enabling fast indoor and outdoor flights without extra hardware. It shows that you can perform demanding drone control on simple devices while keeping the system flexible for research.
What this means in practice
- •For drone developers: Build modular drone autopilots that run advanced control algorithms on low-cost flight controller hardware without extra companion computers.
- •For robotics educators: Use an open-source autopilot framework to teach embedded systems, control, and robotics with real flight experiments on accessible hardware.
Authors
Yifan Lin, Chao Qin, H S Helson Go, Hugh H. -T. Liu
Abstract
Bringing an aerial robotics method from simulation to flight should not require rebuilding a mature autopilot or adding a companion computer. Cybflight is an open-source embedded Rust research autopilot whose typed, replaceable interfaces connect hardware access, perception, state estimation, trajectory planning, and control. This modular development and compile-time optimization workflow is demonstrated with replaceable Rust implementations of model predictive contour-tracking control (MPCTC) and incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) running on one STM32H743 without a companion computer. Using this configuration, the vehicle reaches 12.38 m/s during indoor flight, while an outdoor flight using global navigation satellite system (GNSS) position updates reaches 31.4 m/s. These flights show that running demanding estimation and nonlinear control entirely on a flight-controller microcontroller need not come at the expense of a modular autopilot structure.