MAVLink

MavLink is a communication protocol for MAV (Micro Aerial Vehicles) that has nowadays been extended to all kind of drones (both aerial and terrestrial).

The MAVLink package is basically a stream of bytes encoded and sent over some kind of transductor (via USB serial, RC frequencies, WiFi, GPRS, etc.). By encoding we mean to put the packet into a data structure in a smart way adding checksums, sequence numbers and send it via the channel byte by byte.

Structure of the package

Each MAVLink package is structured in the following way:

The following table describes the message parts and bytes:

Message part Byte Description Value
Header 0 Indicates the start of a new packet v1.0: 0xFE (v0.9: 0x55)
Header 1 Indicates length of the following payload 0 - 255
Header 2 Sequence number, rolls from 0 to 255. Each component counts up his send sequence. Allows to detect packet loss 0 - 255
Header 3 ID of the SENDING system. Allows to differentiate different MAVs on the same network. 1 - 255
Header 4 ID of the SENDING component. Allows to differentiate different components of the same system, e.g. the IMU and the autopilot 0 - 255
Header 5 ID of the message (e.g. 0 = heartbeat) - the id defines what the payload "means" and how it should be correctly decoded. 0 - 255
Payload 6 - (n + 6) Variable sized payload specified by the byte (0 - 255) bytes
Checksum (n+7) to (n+8) ITU X.25/SAE AS-4 hash, excluding packet start sign, so bytes 1..(n+6) Note: The checksum also includes MAVLINK_CRC_EXTRA (Number computed from message fields. Protects the packet from decoding a different version of the same packet but with different variables)

Some comments:

  • The checksum is the same as used in ITU X.25 and SAE AS-4 standards (CRC-16-CCITT), documented in SAE AS5669A. Please see the MAVLink source code for a documented C-implementation of it.
  • The minimum packet length is 8 bytes for acknowledgement packets without payload
  • The maximum packet length is 263 bytes for full payload

Supported data types

MAVLink supports fixed-size integer data types, IEEE 754 single precision floating point numbers, arrays of these data types (e.g. char[10]) and the special mavlink_version field, which is added automatically by the protocol. These types are available:

  • char - Characters / strings
  • uint8_t - Unsigned 8 bit
  • int8_t - Signed 8 bit
  • uint16_t - Unsigned 16 bit
  • int16_t - Signed 16 bit
  • uint32_t - Unsigned 32 bit
  • int32_t - Signed 32 bit
  • uint64_t - Unsigned 64 bit
  • int64_t - Signed 64 bit
  • float - IEEE 754 single precision floating point number
  • double - IEEE 754 double precision floating point number
  • uint8_t_mavlink_version - Unsigned 8 bit field automatically filled on sending with the current MAVLink version - it cannot be written, just read from the packet like a normal uint8_t field

Performance

This protocol was totally geared towards two properties: Transmission speed and safety. It allows to check the message content, it also allows to detect lost messages but still only needs six bytes overhead for each packet. Some transmission examples are presented below:

Link speed Hardware Update rate Payload Float values
115200 baud XBee Pro 2.4 GHz 50 Hz 224 bytes 56
115200 baud XBee Pro 2.4 GHz 100 Hz 109 bytes 27
57600 baud XBee Pro 2.4 GHz 100 Hz 51 bytes 12
9600 baud XBee Pro XSC 900 50 Hz 13 bytes 3
9600 baud XBee Pro XSC 900 20 Hz 42 bytes 10

Sources:

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