Paparazzi is a free and open-source hardware and software project encompassing an exceptionally powerful and versatile autopilot system for fixedwing aircrafts as well as multicopters. Being open enables you to add more features and improve the system. Using and improving Paparazzi is wholeheartedly encouraged by the community. Because of lots of enthusiasts like you , Paparazzi is swiftly evolving into an even more powerful system.
The project includes not only the sourcecode with great code like Kalman filtering code but even all airborne hardware information needed, from Autopilot boards to zesty designed IMU's. A powerful ever-expanding array of ground hardware and software including modems, antennas, and a highly evolved user-friendly ground control station is included as icing on the cake.
All hardware and software is open-source and freely available to you under the GNU licencing agreement.
Several vendors are currently producing and selling Paparazzi autopilots and popular accessories, making the system easy and affordable for everyone.
Jump on the plane and join the Paparazzi UAS project; Enjoy the flight and develop alongside a multitude of individuals and at numerous universities, e.g. ENAC University France, MAVlab of the TU-Delft and AggieAir of Utah State University.
Legal disclaimer
The Paparazzi software source and hardware design is distributed without any guarantee. Before flying, please refer to your country national aviation regulation for Unmanned Aerial Systems, or the one of the country you intend to overfly.
The National Center for Meteorological Research (CNRM-GAME, Toulouse, France) conducted an airborne experiment in Cyprus in March 2015 as part of the BACCHUS project. The main goal of CNRM's contribution is to complement the ground-based observations of aerosol and cloud condensation nuclei with airborne measurements to characterize the vertical distribution of aerosol, radiative fluxes, 3D wind vectors and meteorological state parameters. As payloads were limited to 500g (and total weight < 2.5kg), multiple RPAS (remotely piloted aircraft systems) were instrumented for a specific scientific focus. The Paparazzi system was used to navigate the RPAS. During the campaign, airborne measurements were taken over 4 weeks (5 March to 2 April, 2015) with 52 research flights and 38 hours of flight time. Vertical profile were regularly sampled up to 2100 m.asl (limited by authorized flight ceiling) and often observed the layers of dust originating from the Arabian Peninsula and the Sahara Desert. RPAS profiles generally show a well-mixed boundary layer and compare well with ground-based LIDAR observations. Flights below and within clouds were also coordinated with satellite overpasses to perform 'top-down' closure of cloud micro-physical properties.
The Enac team has been flying several aircraft (X6-Skywalker, Easystar, Funjet) at the Atmospheric Research Center of Lannemezan, close to the Pyrenees in the south of France. The goal was to prepare several meteorological planes for research studies held by Meteo France that will be held next month in Cyprus. Weather conditions was pretty harsh some times, with snow and icy fog, but also gave some really nice pictures, and of course interesting flights up to 1400m AGL with meteorological instruments.
Paparazzi Development Team is pleased to announce the release of a brand new version of Paparazzi; v5.4, giving you the option to enjoy lots of new features and improvements, happy new year!
Curious to know what is added and improved, go herefor an overview. For your enjoyment to view what all those changes look like, click here
If you are already using paparazzi with Git, to enjoy all improvements you can switch to this new version via:
git remote update && git checkout v5.4.
If you are new to Paparazzi and want to join in flying it, you can you can simpy download a tarball or get the source code via:
As you know paparazzi is very modular platform. To show the world how modular we are, we work hard on implementing paparazzi into the Parrot Bebop. At the Micro Aerial Vehicle Laboratory (MAVLab) of Delft University of Technology faculty Aerospace engineering (TU Delft) we received a pre-production model of the Bebop. We do our best to have paparazzi integrated before the launch of the Bebop. If you want to follow the progress check our (youtube channel)
Paparazzi Development Team is pleased to announce the release of the Paparazzi v5.2 stable version with lots of new features and bugfixes.
See the CHANGELOG for an overview of new features and bugfixes.
See the Release Upgrades page for hints on configuration changes that may be required if you are moving to v5.2 from v5.0.
If you are already using paparazzi with Git, you can switch to this new branch with
git remote update && git checkout v5.2.
For new user, you can download a tarball or get the source code with
The Micro Aerial Vehicle Laboratory (MAVLab) of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) is proud the present the 2014 International Micro Air Vehicle Conference (IMAV 2014), now offering the possibility of attending the conference by live stream free-of-cost. The live stream will support most platforms showing innovative keynotes of pioneers in the industry as well as the current state-of-the-art presented by many researchers working on MAV's. The schedule is published on the website of the conference.
The Android application PPRZonDroid, a GCS extension for Android devices that you can use to control Paparazzi aircraft, is now available on Google Play.
John Cassano from the University of Colorado has been flying Paparazzi equipped SUMOs in a remote camp in Antarctica over the last two weeks. See his blog for a detailed report.
To make documenting and learning about Paparazzi easier we have updated the Wiki to the latest Mediawiki version (1.22). This new wiki provides very improved search of the many articles, as well as video embed tags. You can easily embed a youtube video to your article by writing {{#ev:youtubehd|videoID}}, or a vimeo video by adding {{#ev:vimeo|videoID}}. The wiki is hosted on a new dedicated Paparazzi UAV server so it should be faster now too.
The Mavlab team of TU Delft consisted of 12 people coming from aerospace, computer science, embedded programming and artificial intelligence. Thanks to the enormous team efforts in the last months, the team has won prizes in all the categories in which it participated:
Outdoor: 1st price
with an autonomous swarm of 12 MAVs operated by a single operator. The MAVs only had to be plugged in and started their own flight plan, while the operator could monitor their mission status and intervene where necessary. Our participation featured four main innovations: (1) a single operator for 12 MAVs, 3 hybrid UAVs, 7 Parrot AR drones and 2 mini-quadrotors, (2) onboard vision processing on the AR drone with Paparazzi, (3) hybrid UAVs able to fly under any attitude, and (4) the world's smallest open source autopilot, Lisa S (2 grams). The wind conditions were terrible on the outdoor competition day, with 6 Bft, and most teams had their MAVs blown away. Everybody was impressed how the hybrid UAVs were able to cope nicely with these conditions and were still able to perform a precision landing.
Indoor Operations: 1st price
Indoor Autonomy: 3rd price
Indoor the mission consisted of elements such as flying through a window and obstacle zone. We were the only participants to use a flapping wing MAV, which was in size and weight by far the smallest competing MAV (28 cm wing span, 20g). We demonstrated some autonomous flight capabilities such as autonomous takeoff (a world's first), and the capabilities of the DelFly as a First Person View-platform, where the operator flies the MAV on basis of its onboard images. All elements were performed by the operator.
