Most drone software ships as separate programs: one for the aircraft, one for the ground radio, another for the desktop. ADOS takes a different route. There is one agent, and it takes on a profile based on the machine it runs on and the job it needs to do.
Install it, let it fingerprint the hardware, and it becomes the right thing.
The drone profile
On a companion computer bolted next to the flight controller, the agent runs the drone profile. It talks to the autopilot over MAVLink or MSP, encodes and streams video, manages the radio link, handles pairing, and hosts vehicle-side plugins. It supports ArduPilot, PX4, Betaflight, and iNav, and it auto-detects the board it is on from a wide set of supported companion computers. This profile is available today.
The ground station profile
On a small board with a receiving radio, the same agent runs the ground station profile. It pulls video and telemetry off the air link and offers four ways to reach it: an HDMI kiosk, a WiFi access point, a USB tether, and a native Android client. Multiple ground nodes can form a self-healing mesh so receive coverage grows by adding hardware. This profile is available today.
The workstation profile
On the operator's own machine, whether that is a Mac, a Windows box, or a Linux laptop, the agent runs the workstation profile. This is the console. It carries GPU compute for reconstruction, the reconstruction workbench, the direct ground link, and every plugin surface. In a cluster it is usually the master. This profile is available today.
The compute profile
The fourth profile is a lean, headless, GPU-only worker. No user interface, no ground link, just compute that a cluster master hands jobs to. It is the quiet sibling of the workstation, meant to be racked and forgotten. This profile is in development.
Why one codebase
Running one agent across every role means a fix or a feature lands everywhere at once. The wire contracts between the agent and the ground control station stay stable, so an older vehicle and a newer console still understand each other. Plugins written against the agent work regardless of which profile is hosting them. You learn one system, and it follows you from the bench to the field to the desk.
Pick a machine, install the agent, and it becomes what that machine should be.