Under active development. Breaking changes expected. APIs, installers, and UI may shift between releases.
The operator's machine
Usable today. Early access — some pieces run behind a feature flag and APIs may shift between releases.
INSTALL
One command, any desktop
The Workstation runs the same open-source agent as every ADOS profile. Point the installer at the workstation profile and it provisions the compute engine, the interface, and the ground link.
$curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/altnautica/ADOSDroneAgent/main/scripts/install.sh | bash -s -- --profile workstationWHAT IT RUNS
Compute, control, and every surface
The Workstation outgrew the idea of a compute box. It carries the GPU engine and all the UI and the ground link on one machine.
01 / Compute
The ados-compute engine
The Workstation runs the reconstruction and inference work a drone companion cannot. Gaussian splats, point clouds, and meshes build on its GPU, not on the vehicle.
02 / Interface
Every Mission Control surface
The fleet dashboard, planning, simulation, the Fly Mode cockpit, the parameter editor, and plugin panels all run here. One machine, the whole console.
03 / Ground control
The live link to your drones
Connect over UDP, TCP, or the WFB video and telemetry link. Direct Link adds a USB ground radio so a laptop is the ground station with no separate SBC.
04 / Atlas
World-model capture coordination
The Workstation orchestrates Atlas capture across the fleet, then reconstructs the world model in Atlas Forge and streams it back to the operator.
05 / Plugins
The same sandboxed apps
Extensions install here as sandboxed panels and overlays, the identical model used across the GCS. Any plugin can offload heavy work to the compute cluster.
06 / Cluster
Typically the master
One Workstation is the cluster master. It schedules reconstruction and vision jobs onto attached compute-node workers, capability-weighted by GPU and memory.
TOPOLOGY
Master of the fleet and the cluster
The Workstation sits at the center. It talks to drones over the ground link, coordinates Atlas capture, and hands heavy reconstruction jobs to compute-node workers.
SPEC
On the Workstation
- Compute engine
- ados-compute
- Reconstruction
- Splat, point cloud, mesh
- Operating systems
- macOS, Windows, Linux
- Ground link
- UDP, TCP, WFB
- UI surfaces
- Dashboard, Plan, Simulate, Fly, Config, Plugins
- Cluster role
- Master
- License
- GPLv3, open source
EXPLORE
Inside the Workstation
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is ADOS?
ADOS is Altnautica's drone operating stack: the software layers that run across the drone, the ground, and the cloud. It is open source under GPLv3, works with ArduPilot, PX4, Betaflight, and iNav, and runs on hardware you already own.
Does Altnautica need the internet or the cloud?
No. The platform is local-first. Mission Control reaches a drone directly over the local network, and the drone-to-ground link is a local radio. Cloud fleet management through MeshNet is an optional layer for remote access and analytics.
Is Altnautica free and open source?
Yes. All of the software, including Mission Control, the drone agent, the ground agent, and the workstation, is free and open source under GPLv3. There is no paid edition and no locked features. Revenue comes from optional cloud fleet hosting, hardware, and support.
Run the whole console on your own machine
The Workstation profile installs from the same open-source agent. No cloud account required.
Read the docs