Edge autonomy: a mission from a sentence.

An operator types the mission in plain English. The engine plans the flight and commands the autopilot, running on the aircraft's class of processor, with no language model, no GPU and no cloud behind it.

What has been shown

Missions such as "climb to thirty metres, fly one hundred metres north, then fifty metres east, and come back" were planned and flown against ArduPilot, a widely used open autopilot, in its software simulator. An independent ground station, QGroundControl, recorded the same telemetry the engine commanded.

The same run was repeated on a Raspberry Pi on the desk: the console, the language step and the flight commands all ran on the board.

Why the edge matters here

Autonomy that depends on a data link fails when the link is jammed, and in contested airspace it will be. An engine that plans on board keeps working, and one that keeps learning adapts to the aircraft it is actually flying.