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Matthew R Aquin edited this page Mar 29, 2026 · 4 revisions

IronTrack Wiki

IronTrack is a GPLv3-licensed open-source Flight Management System for aerial survey. It replaces fragmented legacy toolchains with a single unified system from planning desk to aircraft cockpit.

This wiki is the human-readable layer above the 52 research documents in docs/. It is meant for maintainers and early adopters.

Start Here

Feature Guides

  • Geodesy & Datums — Karney geodesics, UTM projection, EGM96/EGM2008 geoid models, PhantomData datum safety, altitude conversions.
  • Terrain & Trajectory — Copernicus DEM ingestion, Two-Phase I/O, Elastic Band + B-spline smoothing, pure pursuit, terrain-following pipeline.
  • Flight Planning — Area surveys, corridor mapping, LiDAR missions, sensor geometry, Dubins turns, TSP route optimization.
  • Daemon & API — REST endpoints, WebSocket telemetry, NMEA parsing, serial manager, mDNS discovery, state management.

Current Engine State (v0.3.1)

The IronTrack Core Engine is a high-performance headless CLI and networked daemon built in Rust (~40,000 lines across 44 source files). Current capabilities:

  • Terrain Ingestion: Copernicus GLO-30 DSM parsing with automatic AWS S3 tile fetching, local caching, and Two-Phase I/O (sequential pre-warm, parallel dispatch via rayon).
  • Geodesy: Karney geodesic inverse/direct, Karney-Krüger 6th-order UTM projection, dual-geoid lookup (EGM96/EGM2008) with bilinear interpolation.
  • Planning: Area-grid and corridor flight line generation, terrain-aware AGL adjustment, LiDAR point density kinematics, and custom sensor geometry (GSD, FOV, swath width).
  • Trajectory: Elastic Band energy minimization, cubic B-spline C² smoothing with convex hull safety, dynamic look-ahead pure pursuit, and synthetic validation suite.
  • Kinematics: Dubins path procedure turns (LSL, RSR, LSR, RSL, LRL, RLR) with clothoid transitions and jerk-limited roll.
  • Route Optimization: Nearest-neighbor + 2-opt TSP heuristic with Karney geodesic cost matrix.
  • I/O: 3D GeoPackage (LINESTRINGZ with R-tree), RFC 7946 GeoJSON, QGroundControl .plan, DJI .kmz, KML/KMZ import.
  • Daemon (v0.4 scaffold): Axum REST API + WebSocket telemetry server, NMEA parser, USB serial manager with VID/PID auto-detection, mock telemetry mode.

System Layers

Layer Technology Status
Core Engine Rust (synchronous, rayon) v0.3.1 — active development
Network Daemon Axum/Tokio, REST + WebSocket Scaffolded — target v0.4
Trigger Controller Embedded Rust no_std (STM32/RP2040) Target v0.8
Glass Cockpit Tauri 2.0 (Rust + WebView, Canvas 2D) Target v0.6
Planning Web UI React + MapLibre GL JS Target v0.7

Relationship To The Research Docs

Use this wiki for orientation. For deep mathematical formulas and domain-specific specifications, refer to the 52 numbered research documents (00–52, excluding 27) in the repository's docs/ directory:

  • Foundation: 02_geodesy_foundations.md, 03_photogrammetry_spec.md
  • Infrastructure: 04_geoPackage_architecture.md, 10_Rust_COG_Ingestion.md
  • Engineering: 05_vertical_datum_engineering.md, 09_dsm_vs_dtm.md
  • Terrain & Trajectory: 34_terrain_following_planning.md, 50_dubins_mathematical_extension.md
  • Daemon (v0.4): 28_irontrack_daemon_design.md, 47_daemon_field_hardware.md
  • Reference: formula_reference.md, formula_reference_08_10.md

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