Drone Agent overview

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What it does

1. MAVLink proxy. Connects to your flight controller over serial and forwards MAVLink to WebSocket and TCP clients, so your ground control station and the cloud share one serial link. See MAVLink proxy.
2. Video pipeline. Detects your camera (CSI, USB or a network source), encodes H.264 or H.265 in hardware where the board has an encoder, serves it through a local MediaMTX server, and can transmit it over WFB-ng for long-range HD video. See Video pipeline.
3. Cloud relay. Opt-in and off by default. It posts a 5 s heartbeat and polls commands over Convex HTTP, relays raw MAVLink over MQTT (WSS 443), and relays WebRTC signaling so a remote browser can reach the drone. On the same LAN, Mission Control connects directly. See Cloud relay.
4. Service supervisor. Runs each job as its own systemd unit with automatic restart and memory limits, and starts only the units your node profile needs. See Systemd services.

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At a glance

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Architecture at a glance

ados-supervisor        # Rust: orchestrator (drives systemd)
  ├── ados-mavlink     # Rust: FC serial <-> MAVLink router (WebSocket :8765)
  ├── ados-swarmbus    # Rust: swarm state bus
  ├── ados-control     # Rust: HTTP front on :8080 (dashboard and REST API)
  ├── ados-api         # Python: residual API behind the front
  ├── ados-cloud       # Rust: MQTT and Convex cloud relay (opt-in)
  ├── ados-logd        # Rust: Black Box logging store (off by default)
  ├── ados-video       # Rust: camera, encoder and MediaMTX
  ├── ados-wfb         # Rust: WFB-ng transmitter
  ├── ados-vision      # Rust: vision engine
  └── ados-plugin-host # Rust: extension host

• /run/ados/mavlink.sock carries raw binary MAVLink frames (4-byte length prefix plus payload).
• /run/ados/state.sock carries the vehicle state as length-prefixed msgpack (state.v2, 4-byte big-endian length, body {v, s}), about 10 Hz.

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Hardware detection

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One codebase, four profiles

• drone: the companion computer on the aircraft. Runs the flight controller link, camera, video transmit and cloud relay.
• ground_station: a ground-side board that receives WFB-ng video, runs a Wi-Fi hotspot, serves video to a laptop or phone, and can drive an HDMI display and a status screen. See Ground Agent overview.
• workstation: a desktop or laptop node for local compute and the World Engine extension. It has no flight controller link.
• compute: a headless compute node for offloaded work, also without a flight controller link.

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Interfaces

1. Web dashboard (port 8080): status, telemetry, video, pairing, extensions, logs, diagnostics and settings; first-run setup steps appear until complete. See Dashboard.
2. CLI (ados): a terminal status page, scriptable status, update and uninstall, plus subcommands for hardware, logs, network, plugins, profile, radio and diagnostics. Works over SSH. See Agent CLI reference.
3. REST API (port 8080): served by the native Rust front, which forwards the remaining routes to the residual Python API. Authenticated routes use X-ADOS-Key. See REST API.
4. Mission Control: the ground control station for maps, video, mission planning, hardware management and fleet operations. See Mission Control overview.

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Next steps