This section is procedural. If the rest of the site is “here’s what we built and why”, this is “here’s how to make it run on your machine, here’s what to do when it doesn’t, here’s the checklist before you take it outside.” Three sub-areas — installation, operations, troubleshooting — covering the three temporal phases of working with a drone stack: setting it up, flying it, and fixing it when something breaks.
Installation is the longest-lived content here. Setting up a working ROS 2 + ArduPilot SITL + Gazebo environment from a fresh Ubuntu install takes about an hour if you know exactly what to do and several days if you don’t, mostly because of dependency conflicts between Python venv activation and colcon build (see the venv-colcon conflict guide for the fix that actually works). The host-PC setup, Docker container layout, and physical drone assembly each get their own page.
Operations is shorter but higher-stakes: the pre-flight checklist, how to launch an RL inference run cleanly, how to land safely when something goes wrong mid-flight. The checklist isn’t bureaucratic — it’s a list of things we’ve actually forgotten in the field at least once, costing us anything from a wasted afternoon to a broken propeller.
Troubleshooting is where the most-read content tends to live, because something is always slightly off. The current entries cover DDS discovery weirdness, Gazebo real-time factor dropping below 0.5×, and the classic “drone flips on takeoff” failure mode (almost always a motor-direction error). Each entry follows the same pattern: symptom you’ll see, root cause, fix, verification.
If you’re new to the project, the path through this section is sequential: host-pc-setup → docker-containers → drone-assembly → pre-flight-checklist. Plan a weekend; you won’t finish all of it in an evening.
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