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PX4-Autopilot v1.16.0 Release Notes

Candidate Release

This document covers all changes in PX4 v1.16.0 since the previous stable release (PX4 v1.15.0).

INFO

These notes include only changes merged in 2023 and later — commits before 2023 are not listed.

Read Before Upgrading

Please continue reading for upgrade instructions.

Major Changes

  • Rover support rework
    • New dedicated firmware build for rovers (airframe IDs 50000–52000)
    • Separate modules for Ackermann, differential and mecanum rovers, each with manual, acro, stabilized, position and auto modes
    • Shared pure-pursuit guidance library for all rover modules
    • Legacy rover position control module deprecated in favor of the new modules

Upgrade Guide

Other changes

Hardware Support

Common

  • Optical flow scaling factor - SENS_FLOW_SCALE. (PX4-Autopilot#23936).

  • PX4-Autopilot#22813: Reintroduce optional parameter versioning mechanism for airframe maintainers

  • Battery level estimation improvements. (PX4-Autopilot#23205).

    • Voltage-based estimation with load compensation now uses a real-time estimate of the internal resistance of the battery to compensate voltage drops under load (with increased current), providing a better capacity estimate than with the raw measured voltage.
    • Thrust-based load compensation has been removed (along with the BATn_V_LOAD_DROP parameters, where n is the battery number).
  • The Position (GNSS) loss failsafe configurable delay (COM_POS_FS_DELAY) has been removed. The failsafe will now trigger 1 second after position has been lost. (PX4-Autopilot#24063).

  • Log Encryption now generates an encrypted log that contains the public-key-encrypted symmetric key that can be used to decrypt it, instead of putting the key into a separate file. This makes log decryption much easier, as there is no need to download or identify a separate key file. (PX4-Autopilot#24024).

  • The generic mission command timeout MIS_COMMAND_TOUT parameter replaces the delivery-specific MIS_PD_TO parameter. Mission commands that may take some time to complete, such as those for controlling gimbals, winches, and grippers, will progress to the next item when either feedback is received or the timeout expires. This is often used to provide a minimum delay for hardware that does not provide completion feedback, so that it can reach the commanded state before the mission progresses. (PX4-Autopilot#23960).

  • [uORB] Introduce a version field for a subset of uORB messages (PX4-Autopilot#23850)

  • Compass calibration disables internal compasses if an external compass is available. This typically reduces false warnings due to magnetometer inconsistencies. (PX4-Autopilot#24316).

Control

Estimation

Sensors

Simulation

uXRCE-DDS / ROS2

  • TBD

Multi-Rotor

VTOL

  • TBD

Fixed-wing

Rover

This release contains a major rework for the rover support in PX4:

Infrastructure