KumarRobotics Autonomy Stack is now open source!

Hi everyone!

We open-sourced today the autonomy stack for quadrotors we use in the Vijay Kumar Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Check out the code at GitHub - KumarRobotics/kr_autonomous_flight: Autonomous flight system for aerial robots.

We use this stack in our quadrotors for fully autonomous flight in GPS-denied conditions. The stack is battle-tested: the initial revisions were developed for the FLA program, and we recently used it for long under-canopy flights in forest-like environments: Large-scale Autonomous Flight with Real-time Semantic SLAM under Dense Forest Canopy - YouTube.

Our code is composed of the following modules:

Note on hardware: we run the whole stack onboard our Falcon 4 platform. The Falcon 4 features the following sensor stack: NUC 10 with i7-10710U processor, OVC 3 with VN100-T IMU, Ouster OS1-64 Lidar, Pixhawk 4, ZED-F9P (used for ground truth when we have GPS). The autonomy stack can be adapted to use different sensors. It has a 30-min flight time with sensors and the onboard computer running.

Any comments, questions, and feedback are greatly appreciated! And yes, we are planning to move to ROS2 :wink:

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Really interesting work here.

The license for the code does not seem to be open source.

Are there plans to change the license to an open source license to remove the academic / research restriction, and limitations on modifications and distribution?

Thanks.

Hi ggrigor,

Thanks for the feedback! As we are part of a research institution, we are limited on the choices of licenses we can use. While we understand that this is not a traditional open source license, you are free to use the code in your platforms and modify it. Contacting the university is required for commercial use.

I will bring up your comments to the licensing team at the university!

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Hi,

We were able to modify the license and remove some of the restrictions that were in place in the previous one. You may check the diff here:

These modifications enable non-commercial use and distribution of the code. Happy to get feedback on this!

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