MAVLink Developer Guide

MAVLink is a very lightweight, header-only message marshalling library for micro air vehicles / drones.

MAVLink follows a modern hybrid publish-subscribe and point-to-point design pattern: Data streams are sent / published as topics while configuration sub-protocols such as the mission protocol or parameter protocol are point-to-point with retransmission.

Tip

Because MAVLink doesn't require any additional framing it is very well suited for applications with very limited communication bandwidth. It's reference implementation in C is highly optimized for resource-constrained systems with limited RAM and flash memory. It is field-proven and deployed in many products where it serves as interoperability interface between components of different manufacturers.

MAVLink was first released early 2009 by Lorenz Meier and has now a significant number of contributors.

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