A build log on the ground station for an autonomous warehouse inventory drone, ROS2 on the aircraft, Electron on the laptop, and nothing in between but a WebSocket.
The problem
The drone is a hexacopter that flies through a warehouse on its own, builds a 3D map as it goes, reads the barcodes off the shelves, and hands you a geolocated inventory. It runs ArduCopter on a Pixhawk for flight and ROS2 Jazzy on a Raspberry Pi 5 for everything else: a Unitree 4D LiDAR feeding Point-LIO SLAM, two Pi cameras, and barcode detection.
That is the aircraft. The other half of the problem is the laptop.
Whoever is standing in the warehouse holding that laptop needs to see the telemetry, arm the drone, watch the map build, and read the barcode log. And critically: they should not need ROS installed to do it. A ground station that requires a full ROS2 desktop install on every machine that wants to look at the drone is a ground station that only I can run.
