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Multi-Drone Ground Control System

A cloud ground control system for coordinating fleets of drones, with live telemetry, an operator dashboard, and a local gateway bridging MAVLink to the cloud.

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  • Backend Development
  • Frontend Development
  • Systems Design

The problem

Coordinating multiple drones from a single interface is hard: operators need live telemetry from every aircraft, a way to manage fleets at scale, and a resilient link between the aircraft and the cloud. Most existing ground control tools are built for a single vehicle at a time.

Building the system

PolarisGCS is built around a FastAPI backend with Redis pub/sub for distributing live telemetry, backed by PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB for time-series flight data. A React and TypeScript operator and admin dashboard consumes this data over WebSockets, giving operators a real-time view of every aircraft in the fleet.

On the aircraft side, a PySide6 local gateway bridges MAVLink telemetry from each drone up to the cloud, allowing the system to support fleets of up to 150 drones without overwhelming any single connection.

Outcomes

The result is a cloud GCS that gives operators live visibility into large drone fleets from a browser, with the local gateway handling the low-level MAVLink bridging so the cloud stack only ever deals with clean, structured telemetry.