PX4 Development Guide

This guide is for primarily for software developers and (new) hardware integrators. To fly, build and modify vehicles using supported hardware see the PX4 User Guide.

This guide explains how to:

• Get a minimum developer setup, build PX4 from source and deploy on numerous supported autopilots.
• Understand the PX4 System Architecture and other core concepts.
• Learn how to modify the flight stack and middleware:
  • Modify flight algorithms and add new flight modes.
  • Support new airframes.
• Learn how to integrate PX4 with new hardware:
  • Support new sensors and actuators, including cameras, rangefinders, etc.
  • Modify PX4 to run on new autopilot hardware.
• Simulate, test and debug/log PX4.
• Communicate/integrate with external robotics APIs.

Forums and Chat

The core development team and community are active on the following forums and chat channels.

• PX4 Discuss (recommended)
• Slack (sign up)
• Google+

Developers who want to contribute to the platform are also most welcome to attend the weekly dev call and our other developer events.

Contributing

Contributing & Dev Call explains how to work with our source codelines. Documentation explains how and where documentation changes can be made.

Translations

There are Chinese and Korean translations of this guide. You can you can access these by clicking the language-switcher icon:

Licence

The code is free to use and modify under terms of the permissive BSD 3-clause license. The documentation is licensed under CC BY 4.0. For more information see: Licences.