Dronecode has announced that Lorenz Meier, the creator of Dronecode’s PX4 project, has been recognized by MIT Technology Review in its annual list of Innovators Under 35. Meier created the PX4 flight stack platform for drones and released it as open source in 2011.
According to Dronecode, which is hosted by The Linux Foundation, the PX4 autopilot provides guidance, navigation and control algorithms for autonomous fixed-wing, multi-rotor, and vertical takeoff and land airframes, along with estimators for altitude and position. PX4, a project within Dronecode, is supported by the Computer Vision and Geometry Lab of ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and by numerous industry partners.
MIT Technology Review is an independent media company founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1899.
“Over the years, we’ve had success in recognizing young innovators whose work will change how the world thinks about what technology can do,” says editor David Rotman. “Past honorees include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook; and Jonathan Ive, the chief designer of Apple. We’re proud of our selections and the variety of achievements they celebrate, and we’re proud to add Lorenz Meier to this prestigious list.”
This year’s honorees will be featured online at www.technologyreview.com starting today and in the September/October print magazine, which hits newsstands worldwide on Aug. 29. They will also appear in person at the upcoming EmTech MIT conference, held Nov. 6-9 in Cambridge, Mass.
“It is a fantastic experience going from the small Pixhawk student team in 2008 to a global open-source community serving thousands of developers,” says Meier. “None of this would have been possible without the support of ETH, Dronecode and our many contributors and partnering open-source projects. It is great to see the work of the development community now being available in professional and consumer products. In the next years, my personal focus will be to push the safety, security and reliability of drones onto an industrial-grade level. This will make the ecosystem future-proof and foster broad adoption in commercial and enterprise use cases.”
Photo courtesy of Dronecode’s PX4
