Post by Eklavya Puri

HELIOS was not conceived as a project. It emerged from one. What started as a structured technical assessment of a UAV platform covering flight controller architecture, telemetry pipelines, onboard sensor integration, and stabilization behavior gradually expanded into a research initiative that none of us had fully anticipated at the outset. PID tuning and flight stabilization consumed a significant portion of the early phase. The process was methodical but unforgiving repeated failures, oscillation anomalies, and control inconsistencies that required continuous debugging and recalibration before stable, reliable performance was achieved. It was the kind of problem that resists shortcuts. As the platform matured, the scope of the project shifted. The central question was no longer one of individual system performance, but of inter-system communication specifically, how multiple autonomous platforms could exchange telemetry and coordinate without centralized intervention. That question became the foundation for HELIOS: a distributed multi-node embedded architecture built for real-time telemetry exchange and autonomous communication across devices, implemented on ESP32 and Arduino hardware over LoRa, with GNSS-based positioning, sensor fusion, and geofencing and spoofing mitigation as core components. The framework was developed almost entirely during the Semester 1 break, in a concentrated 10 to 15 day period of continuous work alongside Yash Zanwar, Pradyyumna Waghmode, and Asad Sayyed. Building it from scratch under those conditions was one of the more demanding and rewarding experiences of this initiative. There remains a considerable amount to document both architecturally and in terms of the research directions this work has opened. More to follow. #EmbeddedSystems #AutonomousSystems #UAV #UGV #LoRa #GNSS #ESP32 #Robotics #Engineering