Welcome to Nebula’s documentation!

Nebula is a software system for drone control and automation. It was developed by the Nebula MATEK Team for the Teknofest 2025 competition, sponsored by the Çemberlitaş Gençlik Merkezi (pronounced /chem-ber-lee-tash gench-lik mer-ke-zi/).

Nebula consists of several core components:

1. Ground Control Station (GCS): A desktop application for remotely monitoring and controlling the drone.

2. Edge Server: Runs on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX for data processing, drone interfacing, and sending serial commands to the crane subsystem.

3. ZeroMQ Communication: Provides a lightweight and fast messaging layer between the GCS and the edge server.

Note

This project is no longer maintained, since the competition is over.

Refer to the Usage section for detailed usage instructions and see Installation for setup guidance.

Contents

• Usage
  • Specifications
  • Installation
  • Running the Simulation
• Messaging
  • History
  • Why Not ROS?
    • Our Alternative: ZeroMQ
    • Message Format
    • Server Concurrency Evolution
    • Client-Side: PySide and QThreads
    • Summary
  • General Communication Architecture
    • Asynchronous Frame Processing
    • MAVLink Proxy—Bridging Serial and TCP
    • ZMQ Server—Publishing Video and Command Handling
    • Initialization & Tracker Setup
    • Video Capture & Encoding
    • The Publisher Loop
    • The Control Loop
  • Lifecycle Management
• Herelink Integration
  • Overview
  • Recommended references
  • Usage notes
  • API / Code entry points
• GPS Estimation
  • Image Recognition
  • Camera Calibration
  • GPS Coordinate Estimation
    • Steps
    • Extra Considerations if Needed
• Gazebo Simulation
  • Setup
  • Camera Configuration
  • Worlds
  • Alternative Camera Streaming
• Ground Control Station