not-vibhu / aerobridge

A server to interface with India's Digital Sky API Infrastructure

Introduction

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in India has unveiled a policy of "No permission - No takeoff" for drone flights. This means that public and private companies intending to fly drones in India need to interface with DGCA's infrastructure for flight permissions and other authorizations. These APIs are called India's Digital Sky eco-system. Aerobridge is a server that helps you interface with the APIs in a standardized fashion and be in compliance with the regulatory requirements around operating drones.

How can Aerobridge help you?

If you are a drone manufacturer, operator or just a researcher, you can benefit by adopting Aerobridge in your operational stack:

• Standard way to communicate with Digital Sky APIs
• Integration with PX4 / Ardupilot
• Manage permission artefacts and flight logs
• RFM integration
• Easily manage compliance with NPNT

Webinar and pilot program ✨

We work with drone manufacturers to enable them to become compliant with NPNT by regular onboarding run through our canary program. You can find out more about this on our regular webinar.

Get Involved

Aerobridge is fully open source and you can get involved by participating in our weekly calls (details shortly) and our Slack channel: Request access here. Whether you are a drone enthusiast or an expert, join our community to shape the future of drone flights in India. There are many benefits of participation:

• You can shape the future of this software
• Join the community of fellow professionals interested in an open flexible drone eco-system in India
• Contribute to the development of open infrastructure to support your flight operations
• Reduce the time and cost of compliance

Technical Details

This is an open source implementation of the "Manufacturer's Management Server" to help with key signing and managing interactions with India's Digital Sky API infrastructure. This server can be deployed to any public and private cloud and be used to manage communication with DGCA's Digital Sky Infrastructure and manage NPNT permissions. For a more technical introduction, see this presentation.

Get Started / Self hosting / Debugging

Aerobridge is a Django server and is python based. To setup a local instance with a SQLLite database follow the following steps:

1. Clone the repository
2. Install dependencies, we recommend creating a virtual environment via a tool like Anaconda
3. Install Aerobridge specific dependencies via pip install -r requirements.txt
4. Copy the .env.sample file and create a .env file, you need to put in a strong password for the Django secret
5. Migrate the database python manage.py migrate , this will create a SQLlite database called aerobridge.sqlite3
6. Load sample data python manage.py loadddata registry/defaultregistrydata.json
7. Launch server via python manange.py runserver

Additional Dependencies

sudo apt install sqlite3          # SQLite3 Database
sudo apt install python3-pygraphviz # Graphviz for automatically generating database ER diagram

Usage commands

1. Run the server locally

   DJANGO_SECRET=<YOUR_DJANGO_SECRET_KEY> python manage.py runserver
   

2. Create database ER diagram

   DJANGO_SECRET=<YOUR_DJANGO_SECRET_KEY> python manage.py graph_models -a -g -o test.png
   

3. Run automated tests

   DJANGO_SECRET=<YOUR_DJANGO_SECRET_KEY> python manage.py test
   

Aerobridge Stack

As of May 2021, Aerobridge provides the following toolset:

• Management Server

  • Flight log management: Store Bundled Logs on the server
  • Permission Artefact management: Submission of flight plans and fetching permission artefacts

• GCS Module

  • Mavlink Aerobridge Integration with RFM

• RFM Module

  • A customized Flight Controller Firmware and Bootloader (coming soon)

References

• This repository uses the drone registry schema from Aircraft Registry project.
• Further details regarding NPNT can be found in the latest RPAS Guidance Manual.
• The Digital Sky's Public APIs can be viewed at DigitalSky Platform Public APIs (1.0.0).

Test drive

• You can see the frontend using the Testflight frontend
• Take a look at the backend API: Aerobridge OpenAPI renderer

LICENSE

Aerobridge is licensed under a BSL license popularized by other products such as CockroachDB and Sentry. Basically, it means the following:

• You cannot offer a version of Aerobridge as a service to third parties, if you want to do this, you will need an agreement with Openskies (the license grant restriction)
• After 24 months, the code becomes Apache-2.0 licensed (the conversion period)

In other words, if you want to host / run Aerobridge inside your company for your own operations, you are free to do so without any concerns or restrictions. If you want to offer services to third parties using a release of Aerobridge the opensource project that is less than two years old, you will need an agreement from Openskies.

Logo source / Credit

Hatchful