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Research Timeline

Mission Log

Chronological record of all research entries, experiments, and development milestones.

9 entries
Status: Active
Team Update

Entry 7 – Wrapping Up: What We Built, What We Learned, and What Comes Next

The semester is over. The LionBee flies autonomously, the ELRS port is a genuine open-source contribution, and the MAVLink pipeline works. Here is an honest look at what the team built, what stayed unfinished, and what we would do differently.

#wrap-up#retrospective#autonomous-flight
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Development Update

Entry 6 – First Real Mission Flown & The GPS Accuracy Problem

The drone completed its first full autonomous mission outdoors — take off, fly to a waypoint, land. PID tuning is done and the hardware is flying stably. But GPS accuracy indoors is a real problem, and the simulation drift issue on the software side is still open.

#autonomous-flight#gps#pid-tuning
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Development Update

Entry 5 – Chasing the Drift & Into Uncharted Territory

GPS is stable, blackbox logging works, and the hardware is finally fully operational under iNav. But the software team is wrestling with persistent drift during simulation flights, and the hardware team has hit an architectural wall: MAVLink over SPI alongside ELRS has never been done before.

#mavlink#spi#elrs
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Development Update

Entry 4 – MAVLink Takes Shape & The ELRS Port is Done

The software team is reading real sensor data via MAVLink — but mission planning is proving tricky. Meanwhile, the hardware team completed all seven steps of the ELRS firmware port, and the drone can now be controlled with a real radio transmitter under iNav.

#mavlink#python#sensor-data
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Development Update

Entry 3 – A Real Drone in Simulation & A Hard Decision on the Receiver

The simulation now uses the real LionBee model with accurate weight and thrust. MSP control is fully working. And after a meeting with the project owners, the team has decided to port the SPI ELRS driver from Betaflight to iNav — a big challenge, but the right call.

#gazebo#msp#mavlink
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Development Update

Entry 2 — Controlling the Simulation & Untangling the Hardware

With the development environments in place and the drone assembled, this week was about pushing further into the actual technical work. The software team took their first real steps controlling the drone through code, while the hardware team dug deeper into the board's port configuration trying to solve some stubborn hardware recognition issues.

#gazebo#msp#mavlink
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Development Update

Entry 1 — First Milestones: Firmware Bring-Up & Simulation Link

Our first development week brought real progress on both fronts: the hardware team built a custom iNav target for the LionBee from scratch, while the software team established a working MSP connection to Gazebo. Not without challenges though.

#firmware#msp#mavlink
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Development Update

Entry 0 – Building the Drone & Setting Up Our Development Environment

The drone is assembled and soldered, Gazebo Harmonic is running, and everyone has a working Linux environment — despite five different machine setups across the team. Here's how Week 0 went.

#gazebo#sitl#ubuntu
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Development Update

Welcome to the LionBee Project Blog

We are a team of informatics students from ZHAW building a fully autonomous drone system from scratch. This blog documents our entire journey — from firmware bring-up to autonomous flight.

#project-intro#robotics#open-hardware
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