Overwatch now runs on two drone platforms. Customers who already own Parrot ANAFI UKR fleets continue to get the partnership-route mission-uploader experience. Customers who want the full ground-station experience — live telemetry, mid-flight commands, on-drone video, AI-assisted mission control — move to our PX4 track and get the full Overwatch Ground Station.
This is the single biggest capability shift we've shipped since launch. It's not a new product name for sales decks — it's a genuinely different operational surface, and it's worth explaining what actually changes when you fly on MAVLink instead of AirSDK.
Why two platforms
The original Overwatch was built for Parrot ANAFI UKR via AirSDK, because that's the drone many of our target customers already owned. AirSDK has a specific shape: you build a mission archive (flight supervisor + vision service + safety monitor, packaged as a .tar.gz), upload it over WiFi, and the drone flies autonomously. Once it's off the ground, it doesn't talk to you. No live telemetry, no mid-flight commands, no parameter changes. The drone executes the plan and lands.
That model works for a specific kind of mission — pre-planned grid searches where the operator defines everything up front and trusts the onboard systems to execute. It does not work for operations where the operator needs live situational awareness: watching a patrol fleet, responding to detections, aborting on a weather shift, commanding a drone to investigate a contact, streaming video back to an incident commander.
For that, you need MAVLink. And the rest of the industrial drone world knows it — PX4 and ArduPilot are the open-source flight stacks that underpin everything from research platforms to military-grade hardware. The MAVLink protocol gives you bidirectional command and telemetry for the entire flight. QGroundControl, Mission Planner, MAVSDK — the whole ecosystem is built around live ground-station operation.
We were already offline-first and vanilla-JS. Building a MAVLink bridge into Overwatch was a question of when, not whether.
What changes with MAVLink
Same mission planner, same UI, same Fleet Advisor, same safety architecture. What changes is the capability ceiling when the drone is in the air:
| Capability | AirSDK (ANAFI) | MAVLink (PX4) — Ground Station |
|---|---|---|
| Live position, battery, GPS, attitude | × drone flies offline | ✓ 1–50 Hz standard messages |
| Mid-flight abort, RTH, speed change | × sealed at package time | ✓ any time during flight |
| Parameter tuning mid-flight | × | ✓ PARAM_SET from ground station |
| Live video downlink | × saved to SD, review post-flight | ✓ with Pi companion + camera |
| Live detection streaming | × stays on-drone | ✓ companion pipeline to ground station |
| Raw flight logs (ULog) | × drone-local, proprietary | ✓ MAVFTP — streamable during flight |
| Dynamic geofence, kill-from-GS | × | ✓ fence upload + force-disarm |
| Weather-aware re-planning mid-flight | × can't update a flying drone | ✓ upload new mission mid-flight |
In practice, on an Orchestrate multi-drone patrol, the difference looks like this: with MAVLink, you watch the fleet on the map in real time, see each drone's battery, get alerts when something crosses a threshold, and can hit Emergency RTH or Kill Switch in the UI if anything goes wrong. The Fleet Advisor's recommendations are calculated against live telemetry, not projections. The weather abort logic actually aborts flying drones instead of just warning you.
On AirSDK, the drone leaves the hotspot and you wait. If you realise mid-flight that the weather has turned, your options are: watch it come home on schedule, hope the onboard failsafes kick in, or grab the RC transmitter and take manual control. None of those are "ground station" operations.
Why "Overwatch Ground Station" is a thing, not just a feature
We name it deliberately. Core and Orchestrate are the products — one is single-drone grid search, the other is multi-drone 24/7 patrol. Overwatch Ground Station is the platform they sit on when running on MAVLink hardware.
That matters commercially because the same Overwatch software becomes a qualitatively different offering depending on which drone track the customer chooses. Core-on-MAVLink is a full mission-control workstation. Core-on-AirSDK is an upload-and-pray tool. The software is identical; the ceiling isn't. We price and position accordingly.
For gov / SAR / LE / fire / coastguard procurement, the Ground Station framing also matches how customers think about the problem. They know what a ground station is. They have one already for their crewed aircraft, their existing UAS fleet, their radar. "Overwatch Ground Station" slots into that mental model. "Mission uploader" doesn't.
The MVP fleet we built around
Our reference MAVLink hardware is three Holybro X500 V2 quadcopters, eight Zeee 4S 5200 mAh LiPo batteries, two ISDT D2 Mark 2 dual-channel chargers, three ESP32 WiFi telemetry modules, and one RadioMaster Pocket ELRS transmitter for manual override. Total hardware cost: around €1,780 for the whole 3-drone fleet.
That's not a typo. A full MVP 24/7 patrol capability for under two thousand euros of hardware. Compare to a single crewed coastal patrol boat at €200k–500k per year in operating cost. Compare to a single crewed helicopter hour at €1,000–3,000. The economics only work because the PX4 ecosystem has been commoditising industrial drone hardware for a decade, and we finally have a ground station platform that lets a gov / defence customer deploy it without writing their own software.
Phase 2 adds a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W + Camera Module 3 to each drone (about €50 per drone, €150 for the fleet). That unlocks live H.264 video streamed to the ground station, on-drone detection (TFLite MobileNet SSD at 5–10 FPS), and photo chain-of-custody capture. The Pi also becomes the platform for future add-ons — thermal cameras, zoom gimbals, cellular backhaul, AprilTag precision landing.
Phase 3 upgrades two more drones to the Pi companion, and the fleet is production-ready: all three drones running detection, all three streaming video, all three orchestrated from a single MacBook running Overwatch.
What's live today in Overwatch Ground Station
As of today, the MAVLink track delivers (alongside everything Core and Orchestrate already do):
- Live telemetry at 1–50 Hz per drone — position, battery, GPS status, heading, mission progress
- Mission upload via the MAVLink mission protocol, with live progress bar per drone
- Mid-flight commands — arm, disarm, RTH, speed change, kill switch, emergency RTH all work from the ground-station UI
- Three-layer safety — the GS kill button plus PX4 onboard failsafes plus the RC transmitter's hardware kill switch, with the full procedure documented in the pre-flight checklist
- Pre-Flight Health Panel — eight automated checks per drone, AI-assisted go/no-go recommendation, launch button gated until green
- Overwatch AI pre-flight advisor running on both Core and Orchestrate
- Simulated MAVLink mode for development and demos — three virtual PX4 drones that behave like the real fleet, no hardware needed
- Notarized macOS installer and air-gapped toggle for classified / EU-data-residency deployments
Video, on-drone detection, and the full companion-computer pipeline are the Phase 2 work — tracked in the public roadmap and scheduled alongside the X500 commissioning.
What it means for customers
If you already own ANAFI UKR, nothing about your install changes. Continue to use Overwatch as the mission-planning and deployment tool. The AirSDK path remains supported and gets bug fixes and feature improvements alongside the MAVLink track.
If you're evaluating Overwatch for a new deployment, you now have a choice. Pick ANAFI if your mission profile is pre-planned grid searches with trusted on-drone autonomy and no need for live ground-station oversight. Pick PX4 if you need live situational awareness, video, mid-flight control, and the ability to command-and-abort in the air — which describes the vast majority of SAR, LE, fire, coastguard, and security operations.
If you want to see what the MAVLink ground-station experience looks like before the hardware lands, the Overwatch simulator runs three virtual PX4 drones in the public demo. Same UI, same telemetry rates, same command channel — just without the physical drones. Request a walkthrough if you want us to show you what live-fleet operation looks like on the real platform.