Autonomous infrastructure for underserved communities: drone delivery and mesh communication on solar-powered nodes.
Supply Open Sky is an integrated autonomous drone delivery system designed to bring potable water, medicines, mail, and essential goods to communities that lack reliable access to basic services. It is built for geographically isolated regions where conventional logistics are ineffective or impossible; areas without dependable road infrastructure or established distribution networks.
The architecture is grounded in three principles: full operational autonomy with no human intervention required along the network, resilience to communication outages, and modular scalability that allows the network to grow without redesigning existing infrastructure.
The network is organized as a tree topology branching out from a central Hub. Drones depart loaded with payload, deliver along scheduled routes or to on-demand GPS coordinates, and return to be reloaded. Each Node is solar-powered, fully autonomous, and serves a dual purpose: it is relay infrastructure for drone operations, and at the same time a permanent service point for the surrounding community; providing public water access and an emergency communication link via a LoRa Mesh backbone.
Supply Open Sky is not just a delivery system. It is logistical infrastructure designed to exist where no other infrastructure does.
This repository hosts the public architectural documentation of the Supply Open Sky project. The implementation code - drone firmware, scheduling engine, hub software, communication stack, simulator, dashboard - is maintained in a private repository during the current development phase and is not published here.
- BLUEPRINT.md full architectural specification of the system: operational concept, network topology, mission types, control architecture, communication stack, and design considerations.
- NOMENCLATURE.md reference for the technical terminology used across the project documentation and source code.
The system is organized in three layers, each with distinct responsibilities and components:
graph TD
OPS["<b>Operations layer</b><br/><sub>Hub · scheduler · mission planning · React dashboard</sub>"]
NET["<b>Network layer</b><br/><sub>Solar-powered nodes · LoRa mesh backbone · landing pads</sub>"]
EDGE["<b>Edge layer</b><br/><sub>Drones · field transmitters in villages</sub>"]
OPS --> NET
NET --> EDGE
The Operations layer plans missions, schedules flights, and coordinates the network; without human intervention along the network during routine operations. The Network layer is the physical backbone of the system: relay nodes that host battery swaps, water tanks, and the LoRa mesh radio infrastructure, designed to keep operating when external communication is degraded or absent. The Edge layer is where the system meets the world, drones flying missions on pre-loaded plans that complete even if the radio link is lost, and field transmitters distributed to villages within range of each Node.
For the topology of the network itself (Hub, Nodes, branches), see BLUEPRINT.md and NOMENCLATURE.md.
The system architecture is fully specified; reference implementations of the central operations software (Hub, mission scheduler, mesh communication sidecar) are deployed on dedicated single-board computers and operate in a first end-to-end network configuration. Mission planning and execution have been validated against a software-in-the-loop simulation environment.
Current focus is on operational hardening, telemetry instrumentation, and validation of the scheduling logic on extended test scenarios.
This section is updated periodically as the project advances.
To make project activity verifiable rather than rhetorical, this repository publishes two automatically generated files that summarise development metrics from the private working repository:
- STATUS.md human-readable summary: commit cadence over the last 30 days, issue throughput, branch activity, and continuous integration status.
- STATUS.json the same data in a machine-readable form (schema version 1.0), suitable for dashboards or scripted checks.
Both files are regenerated daily by an automated workflow that runs against
the private repository, then committed here by a dedicated GitHub App
(supply-open-sky-mirror-bot[bot]). On days with no underlying activity,
no commit is produced; an unchanged file therefore reflects an unchanged
project, not a stale pipeline.
The metrics deliberately exclude any figure that would require independent verification (deployment counts, test totals beyond what CI exposes, field operation statistics). Only data that GitHub can attest to directly is reported.
- LinkedIn Matteo Casavecchia
- Watch this repository for documentation updates and future releases.
Documentation contributions, corrections, translations, and feedback are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines on how to report issues, propose changes, and what is currently in scope.
For security-related concerns, see SECURITY.md.
This project follows the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct.
The documentation in this repository is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material with appropriate attribution.
The implementation code of Supply Open Sky is maintained in a separate private repository and will be released, when published, under the Apache License 2.0.