IS4S Participates in Dronecode Hackathon for MAVLink-Military Integration
Image credit: Dronecode Foundation
IS4S was proud to work alongside 13 companies at the MAVLink-Military Integration Hackathon, hosted by the Dronecode Foundation and Auterion at Auterion’s facility in Virginia in July 2026. This three-day event consisted of two days collaborating, debating, building, and hacking before culminating in a third day of field demonstrations. Ultimately the teams produced seven working integrations using MAVLink-Military as the communications platform.
About the Event
The Dronecode Foundation is a not-for-profit and vendor-neutral organization dedicated to supporting an open drone ecosystem and enabling users to build and use drone applications in ways that are safe, scalable, and reliable. They organized this event to rapidly integrate autonomous systems using MAVLink-Military (MAVLink-M). MAVLink-M is a dialect and extension of MAVLink, the open and widely adopted lightweight messaging protocol for drones and drone components.
The integrations spanned a variety of flight controllers, payloads, and ground control stations. Ramón Roche, executive director of Dronecode Foundation, said, “In less than 48 hours, members of the Dronecode community integrated their drone platforms, proving that competing vendors can solve interoperability problems faster in the open than any of them can alone. With MAVLink-M we are building toward a future where cross-vendor plug-and-play payloads are the default, not a custom integration project” (Source: Dronecode Foundation Press Release).
Clay Heath (IS4S, left) holding the IS4S Antero7 drone and training munition prototype alongside Ryan Johnston (Applied Aeronautics, middle) and Robert Leishman (IS4S, right) standing behind the Applied Aeronautics Skybeam quad and Albatross fixed wing aircraft.
IS4S & Applied Aeronautics
This event and its goals perfectly align with IS4S’s foundational belief in eliminating vendor lock wherever possible and providing the government, and ultimately the warfighter, with the best solution at the lowest cost on the fastest timeline.
Team members out of our Denver site collaborated with partners at Applied Aeronautics to have a substantial impact on the success of this event by coordinating extensive updates and commits to the initial MAVLink-M repository prior to and during these three days. The joint contributions of these two companies dramatically improved the robustness and applicability of MAVLink-M by:
Adding over 15 new messages, more than double the initial commit of 11.
Providing over 66 additional enumerations to the original 9 that were identified.
Coupling MAVLink-M to align with 17 U.S. military standards and doctrine.
Adding over 1,600 lines of XML code to the 278 in the initial commit.
In addition to expanding the foundation of MAVLink-M, IS4S and Applied Aeronautics worked to demonstrate a two-platform integration where MAVLink-M messages would be passed from an Applied Aeronautics Albatross, a fixed wing aircraft performing an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) role, to an IS4S Antero7, a 7” one-way attack (OWA) drone. In the demonstration, the Albatross acquires, identifies, fixes, and passes the target to the Antero7. The Antero7 operator sees the MAVLink-M message transferring the target, accepts the transfer, and receives a bearing indicator guiding them to the target. Once the target is found and reconfirmed, the operator can choose to engage the target.
Ryan Johnston, CEO of Applied Aeronautics, said, “This work is a great example of what can happen when teams come together around a shared goal. Collaboration like this helps move the industry forward faster, breaking down barriers between platforms and showing what’s possible when we work together rather than in silos.”
Beyond just demonstrating this two-platform integration, IS4S debuted a prototype training munition, which rides alongside the Antero7 and uses a small Universal Payload Interface (sUPI) to connect. This training munition uses a camera to record imagery upon being “fired,” which allows for safe practices of OWA capabilities and provides visual feedback to the operator. This device has the potential to reduce costs and improve operator effectiveness.
“IS4S is proud to lead out with Applied Aeronautics on improving and operationalizing MAVLink-M. It was great to work alongside so many other organizations to support and prove that an open drone ecosystem is the future for autonomous systems,” said Robert Leishman, IS4S Denver site lead. “We look forward to seeing how MAVLink-M will continue to evolve to support defense missions and applications.”
The range of U.S. and international companies that participated in the hackathon exemplifies how powerful this type of collaboration can be: Applied Aeronautics, Ascend Engineering, Artificer Group, Auterion, Carlson Software/Camflite/Viter Systems, DeltaQuad, Firestorm Labs, IS4S, Neros Technologies, Production Systems Automation, ORQA, Rajant, RIIS, and UVIFY. Representatives from the government were also present to observe the process and outcomes, and there was also support from the Drone Dominance Program.
For more information about IS4S or our drone capabilities, please reach out to Mar.Com@is4s.com.