Drones that finish the mission when the network doesn't.

astral-sdk is the open Python interface for ArduPilot-based drones used in the Astral stack. It bundles MAVLink primitives, camera drivers, and minimal examples so that you can integrate drone hardware into your own applications without reinventing the boilerplate.

uv add astral-sdk

or

pip install astral-sdk

Camera support is optional. Pick the drivers you need:

pip install astral-sdk[camera-oak]        # Luxonis OAK-D Lite
pip install astral-sdk[camera-realsense]  # Intel RealSense D435i
pip install astral-sdk[all]               # both

Copy src/astral_sdk/config_example.yaml to config.yaml in your working directory and edit serial_port to match your flight controller.

import time
import astral_sdk as drone

# Arm, take off to 2 meters AGL, hover, and land.
if drone.takeoff(2.0):
    time.sleep(5)
    drone.land()

drone.disconnect()

All movement commands are clamped to safe limits (see MIN_ALTITUDE, MAX_ALTITUDE, MAX_VELOCITY, MAX_YAW_RATE in astral_sdk.drone). Failsafes can be installed onto the flight controller once with astral_sdk.configure_failsafes().

See the examples/ directory for runnable scripts:

• motor_test.py — verify motor order and ESC connections.
• arm_takeoff_land.py — minimal flight cycle.
• camera_capture.py — capture a frame from the onboard camera.

• Python SDK — MAVLink wrappers for arming, takeoff, landing, velocity and position control, telemetry, parameters, and failsafe setup.
• Camera drivers — common abstraction (Camera, CameraFrame) plus implementations for OAK-D Lite (DepthAI) and Intel RealSense D435i.
• CLI utilities — astral-arm-disarm and astral-motor-test.
• ROS 2 bridge — an optional astral_drone package under ros2_ws/ that exposes the camera and MAVLink as ROS 2 topics for use with Isaac ROS Visual SLAM and Nav2.

The Astral product stack also includes pieces that are intentionally not open source. To set expectations:

• Cloud orchestration. Fleet provisioning, IoT messaging, video ingestion, and remote-pilot routing live in our service. They are not required to fly with this SDK.
• On-device VLM stack. Reasoning loop, vision-language prompts, grounding, target selection, and reactive planning are proprietary.
• Flight hardware. The companion-computer image, installer scripts, and platform integrations ship with our hardware product.

If you need any of those, talk to us at astral.us.

• Flight controller: any ArduPilot-compatible board reachable over MAVLink. Tested on Cube Orange.
• Companion computer: tested on NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. macOS and generic Linux work for development against SITL.
• Cameras: Luxonis OAK-D Lite, Intel RealSense D435i.

Full docs live at astral.us/docs.

Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.

Early. APIs may change before 1.0. Pin a version in production.