Stephen Dade - Autonomous Systems Engineer at Freelance

Stephen Dade

Autonomous Systems Engineer at Freelance

Canberra, Australia

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Stephen Dade is an autonomous systems and communications engineer with 13 years’ experience building and integrating resilient remote autonomous systems across defence and civilian domains. Deeply embedded in the ArduPilot ecosystem since 2011, he has contributed to core MAVLink tooling, test automation for pymavlink, GCS improvements (MAVProxy/APM Planner) and extensive documentation that underpins reliable deployments. He combines hands-on embedded and DevOps skills—designing companion computer integrations for Raspberry Pi and NVIDIA Jetson, streamlining Windows/Linux build and packaging, and architecting telemetry and satellite links for long-range RAS operations. At Nova Systems and in defence roles he translated spectrum, SATCOM and network analysis into operational capability and policy input, and as a freelancer he has delivered situational awareness and cyber-hardened command infrastructure for mixed crewed/uncrewed operations. Notably, his work spans from low-level hardware drivers and unit tests to large-scale visualization and network management, reflecting both meticulous engineering and systems-level thinking. Based in Canberra, he blends open-source stewardship with practical field experience enabling rapid, reliable autonomous vehicle integration.

13 years of coding experience

11 years of employment as a software developer

Australian National University

Github Skills (47)

unit-testing10

autopilot10

pytest10

python10

scripting10

mavlink10

sphinx10

testing10

windows10

linux10

build-system10

cmake10

trading-bot10

debian-packaging10

automation10

Programming languages (8)

C#C++ShellCJavaScriptSassHTMLPython

Github contributions (5)

ArduPilot/MAVProxy

Nov 2012 - Oct 2022

MAVLink proxy and command line ground station

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:25 reviews, 240 commits, 207 PRs in 10 years 1 month

Contributions summary:Stephen primarily focused on enhancing the MAVProxy software, which is a ground station for MAVLink-based systems. Their contributions involved addressing Windows compatibility issues within the core application (`mavproxy.py`) and several modules, including `map`, `console`, and `srtm`. They also created batch files for launching MAVProxy in Windows, streamlining the user experience for Windows users.

ground-stationpythonproxymavlink-proxystation

ArduPilot/pymavlink

Jun 2018 - Jan 2022

python MAVLink interface and utilities

Role in this project:

QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer

Contributions:3 reviews, 8 commits, 8 PRs in 3 years 7 months

Contributions summary:Stephen primarily contributed to the testing infrastructure of the pymavlink project, focusing on unit tests. They added comprehensive tests for multiple modules including `rotmat`, `mavexpression`, `mavparm`, and `fgFDM`. The user also updated existing tests for `quaternion` and expanded test coverage of the javascript generator by adding Mavlink 2.0 support. These contributions improved the project's reliability and ensured the correctness of key mathematical and communication libraries.

mavlinkpython

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