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Betaflight

DEVOPS
Velocity0.0

Flight controller firmware for radio-controlled multirotors and fixed-wing aircraft

betaflight.com ↗

Betaflight grew a real autopilot: waypoint missions, geofence RTH and MAVLink ground control

fpvflight-controllerautopilotwaypoint-missionsmavlinkdronecan
◆Current state
Betaflight runs two lines at once. The 2025.12.x branch is maintenance: UART interrupt handling, MSP race conditions, failsafe clamping and board-target refreshes. The 2026.6 line, released as 2026.6.1 in August, carries an AUTOPILOT mode with flight plans, CLI waypoint commands, geofence return-to-home and LAND loiter, plus a DroneCAN stack and MAVLink ground control. 2026.6.2 in September backported a single I2C guard fix.
◆Where it's heading
The autopilot work is not a single feature but a rebuild of how the firmware handles position: the release notes show position control unified on a velocity primitive and the existing GPS rescue reimplemented as a flight-plan mission rather than a special case. That direction pulls hardware integration along with it — DroneCAN node allocation, GNSS Fix2, ESC telemetry and MAVLink ground-station handshaking are all things a manually flown craft does not need. The SITL harness gained fidelity and per-run session ids in the same releases, which is what you build when autonomous behaviour has to be regression-tested rather than test-flown.
◆Prediction
With GPS rescue now running through the mission engine, the next releases on this line should concentrate on hardening that path — the release candidates already added an rx-loss policy, sanity checks and an arming gate for flight plans, and safety scaffolding of that kind usually keeps accumulating after the feature ships.

◆Recent moves

  1. 1mo ago

    Betaflight 2026.6.2 guards I2C accessors against an unset bus

    A one-fix backport guarding I2C bus accessors against an unset bus. Routine maintenance on the new 2026.6 line.

    View source ↗
  2. 3mo ago

    Betaflight 2026.6.1 ships AUTOPILOT mode and waypoint missions

    ⚡ SPARK

    This is the release the whole 2026.6 candidate series was building toward, and it changes what the firmware is for rather than how well it does what it already did. Everything on the parallel 2025.12 branch in this window is maintenance by comparison.

    View source ↗
  3. 3mo ago

    Betaflight 2025.12.2 refreshes about two dozen board targets

    A target-only release updating configurations for roughly two dozen flight controller boards, with no firmware behaviour change. Routine hardware-catalogue upkeep on the maintenance branch.

    View source ↗
  4. 3mo ago

    Betaflight 2025.12.4 backports CLI, failsafe and UART fixes

    Three fixes backported from the development line: a CLI MSP race condition, unconditional clamping of the failsafe procedure to a valid range, and guarding half-duplex pinless UART modes. Standard stable-branch maintenance while the 2026.6 work happens elsewhere.

    View source ↗
  5. 3mo ago

    Betaflight 2026.6.0 rc3 adds geofence RTH and mission-based rescue

    The candidate where the autopilot took its final shape — geofence return-to-home missions, LAND loiter, rescue expressed as a synthesised mission, and OSD waypoint elements with MAVLink SET_CURRENT. Real feature development this late in a candidate series shows how much of the mission engine was still being designed.

    View source ↗
  6. 4mo ago

    Betaflight 2026.6.0 rc2 adds flight-plan safety gates

    Safety scaffolding around the new autopilot: an rx-loss policy, sanity checks, geofence and an arming gate for flight plans, plus FMSH SPI flash support and a bootloader address fix on H5. The safety work arriving separately from the feature is a sign the mission engine was considered risky enough to fence off before release.

    View source ↗