Skip to main content
A drone running ADOS has two computers on board. The flight controller runs the autopilot: motors, stabilization, GPS and sensors. The companion computer runs the Drone Agent, which handles video, the radio link, the cloud relay and the REST API. On the ground, Mission Control runs in your browser, the desktop app or the Android GCS. For long-range video, a ground station running the Ground Agent sits between the radio and your devices.

​
Ways Mission Control reaches a drone

Mission Control shows which path it is using for each node: Direct FC, Direct · LAN, a WFB path through a ground station, or Cloud relay. Flight controllers running ArduPilot and PX4 speak MAVLink; Betaflight and iNav speak MSP. On the drone, the agent’s native Rust MAVLink router owns the serial link to the flight controller, sends its own heartbeat as an onboard controller, and fans MAVLink out to Mission Control and to the other agent services. Mission Control parses MAVLink and MSP frames itself in the browser. See MAVLink protocol.

​
Video

The agent captures a USB or MIPI CSI camera and encodes H.264 or H.265. The stream goes out over WFB-ng to a ground station, which serves it to browsers over WebRTC (WHEP). Over the cloud, video is negotiated through MQTT signaling. See Video stack for every hop and the latency figures.

​
Cloud relay

The cloud relay is off by default: a fresh node runs Local only. When you choose Altnautica cloud or Self-hosted, the agent:
  • relays raw MAVLink frames over MQTT on ados/{id}/mavlink/tx (flight controller to Mission Control) and ados/{id}/mavlink/rx (Mission Control to flight controller), with the same shape for MSP on ados/{id}/msp/tx and ados/{id}/msp/rx. Mission Control decodes these frames directly, so telemetry arrives at the flight controller’s own stream rate.
  • posts a status heartbeat over HTTPS every 5 seconds and polls for queued commands every 5 seconds.
See Cloud infrastructure for the full topic list, and Self-hosting to run the cloud yourself.

​
Ground stations

A ground station is the same agent installed with the ground_station profile. The profile is chosen at install time, not detected. It receives WFB-ng video and serves it to laptops and phones over its Wi-Fi access point or USB tether, and to an HDMI monitor in kiosk mode. See Node profiles and the Ground Agent overview. For the full component map, see System overview.

​
Next steps

Node profiles

The four profiles and what each one runs.

System overview

The full architecture, component by component.

Quickstart: Mission Control

Run the ground control station now. No hardware needed.
Last modified on October 11, 2026