Andrew Tridgell
Associate Professor (honourary)
Canberra, Australia
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inAutonomous Robotics and Computer Vision Development
Andrew Tridgell is a systems-focused software engineer and Associate Professor (honorary) with 30 years’ experience leading low-level driver architecture and fixed-wing/VTOL development for the ArduPilot project. As ArduPilot’s systems lead and a prolific open-source contributor, he bridges embedded firmware, bootloaders, radio stacks and ground-station tooling—work that has touched well-known projects like PX4, ccache and Kerberos (Heimdal). He combines deep hardware-software expertise (STM32, Si1000, ESP8266) with algorithm integration for research projects at ANU, including bushfire-related autonomy work. Beyond coding, he provides consulting for ArduPilot adopters and maintains extensive technical documentation and tooling across the ecosystem. Colleagues value him for solving subtle low-level problems—such as sensor bus and timing issues—that often make or break reliable flight systems.
30 years of coding experience
Australian National University
English, Swedish
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (63)
bootloader10
caching10
c-language10
sens10
restructuredtext10
autopilot10
python10
kerberos10
mavlink10
firmware10
rs10
c-programming10
c1110
abstraction-layer10
spi10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
ArduPilot/SiK
Nov 2011 - Sep 2022
Tools and firmware for the Si1000
Role in this project:
Back-end & Embedded Systems Developer
Back-end & Embedded Systems DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 447 commits, 12 PRs in 11 years
Contributions summary:Andrew's contributions focused on the implementation of tools and firmware for the Si1000 radio. They added new parameters for radio configuration and improved the Manchester and Duty Cycle options. They also added support for antenna diversity and MAVLink2, indicating significant involvement in the radio's low-level operation and data transfer protocols. Additionally, they implemented a test tool to check the TDM performance.
firmware
ArduPilot/pymavlink
Sep 2016 - Dec 2022
python MAVLink interface and utilities
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:23 releases, 135 reviews, 276 commits in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily contributed to the `pymavlink` repository, a Python interface and utilities for the MAVLink protocol. Their work focused on enhancing the functionality of the library by implementing and improving flight mode setting, including separate functions for ArduPilot and PX4, indicating a focus on the back-end logic of communicating with autopilots. The user also added utilities and features like sertotcp.py. and incorporated handling of message definitions, including the use of #pragma once.
mavlinkpython
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