Fourteen companies tested the military MAVLink-M dialect across flight controllers, payloads, and ground control stations, completing seven working integrations in a field demonstration in Virginia.
The Dronecode Foundation has completed a two-day engineering hackathon and field demonstration aimed at validating MAVLink-Military (MAVLink-M), an open communications standard designed to allow military uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and their equipment to operate across different manufacturers.
Hosted by Auterion at its manufacturing facility in Manassas, Virginia, the event brought together 38 representatives from government and industry and involved 14 companies spanning airframes, payloads, communications, and software. Participants included Applied Aeronautics, Ascend Engineering, Artificer Group, Auterion, DeltaQuad, Firestorm Labs, IS4S, Neros Technologies, Production Systems Automation, Orqa, Rajant, RIIS, and UVIFY, as well as Carlson Software, Camflite, and Viter Systems.
During the event, engineering teams completed seven working MAVLink-M integrations. The implementations were tested across different flight controllers, payloads and ground control stations, while a neutral test payload was used to verify each implementation end-to-end. The field demonstrations followed two days of technical work and provided a test of whether equipment supplied by different vendors could exchange commands and data through the same protocol.
MAVLink-M is an open MAVLink 2 dialect developed specifically for military UAS. Its current coverage focuses particularly on payload command and control. The dialect uses a reserved identification block, allowing it to remain compatible with the civilian MAVLink protocol, which is deployed on more than 1 million vehicles.
MAVLink itself was introduced in 2009 as a lightweight messaging protocol for communication between drones, flight controllers, ground control systems and onboard hardware, including over low-bandwidth networks. MAVLink-M extends this framework to defence applications, providing a common interface for equipment that would otherwise require manufacturer-specific integration.
The initiative is also linked to the US Department of Defense’s Drone Dominance Program, a $1 billion effort supporting domestic production of small military drones and addressing supply-chain dependence. Dr. Erin Cherry, Senior Advisor at the Test Resource Management Center, represented the program at the event.
Dronecode Executive Director Ramón Roche said: “The participating teams integrated their platforms in less than 48 hours, demonstrating the potential for competing manufacturers to address interoperability through an open development process.”
“What we are seeing is the emergence of a true common language for defence UAS systems, where payloads and flight controllers can finally communicate without bespoke integration work.”, he added.
The MAVLink-Military working group plans to finalize the current draft of the standard and establish a neutral validation method for cross-vendor implementations between flight controllers and payloads. Further demonstrations are planned as the protocol moves toward adoption.