PX4 consists of two main layers: The PX4 flight stack, an autopilot software solution and the PX4 middleware, a general robotics middleware which can support any type of autonomous robot.
All airframes, and in fact all robotic systems including boats, share a single codebase. The complete system design is reactive, which means that:
- All functionality is divided into exchangeable components
- Communication is done by asynchronous message passing
- The system can deal with varying workload
In addition to these runtime considerations, its modularity maximizes reusability.
Each of the blocks below is a separate module, which is self-contained in terms of code, dependencies and even at runtime. Each arrow is a connection through publish/subscribe calls through uORB.
** Info ** The architecture of PX4 allows to exchange every single of these blocks very rapidly and conveniently, even at runtime.
The controllers / mixers are specific to a particular airframe (e.g. a multicopter, VTOL or plane), but the higher-level mission management blocks like the commander and navigator are shared between platforms.
** Info ** This flow chart can be updated from here and open it with draw.io Diagrams.
The interaction with the ground control station (GCS) is handled through the "business logic" applications including the commander (general command & control, e.g. arming), the navigator (accepts missions and turns them into lower-level navigation primitives) and the mavlink application, which accepts MAVLink packets and converts them into the onboard uORB data structures. This isolation has been architected explicitly to avoid having a MAVLink dependency deep in the system. The MAVLink application also consumes a lot of sensor data and state estimates and sends them to the ground control station.
{% mermaid %} graph TD; mavlink---commander; mavlink---navigator; position_estimator-->mavlink; attitude_estimator-->mavlink; mixer-->mavlink; {% endmermaid %}