How-to Guides

Task-oriented recipes for working on AirStack. Each guide assumes you've completed Get AirStack Flying and know the Key Concepts; it gets you through one job without re-teaching the system.

Guide groups

Group	Covers
Development Environment	Local setup, VSCode & debugging, forking, remote dev on OSMO
Docker & Builds	Pulling/building images, per-container shells, build profiles
Simulation	Scene catalog, Isaac container workflows, spawning drones, overhead camera, Unreal export
Autonomy	Adding a state estimator, world model & planner, or controller; coordination algorithms and payloads; the integration checklist
GCS Operation	Waypoints & geofences, Foxglove, operating the GCS, extending the visualizer
Robot & Field	Hardware install, adding a vehicle or platform, HITL, logging, data offloading
Modules & Stacks	Creating a custom stack, integrating a module into a stack, module CI
Testing	Unit tests, end-to-end benchmarks, using CI
Contributing	Branching & releases, docs, feature notebook, working with coding agents, extending the CLI

Quick command reference

The full command and flag tables live in the CLI Reference. The ones you'll use constantly:

airstack up --sim isaac --robots 1     # launch sim + robot + GCS
airstack status                        # container status
airstack connect robot-desktop         # tmux into a container
airstack test -m unit -v               # run unit tests
airstack docs                          # serve these docs locally
airstack down                          # stop everything

Looking for why things are built this way? See Concepts: Key Concepts, System Architecture, and the Modular AirStack design pages.