// the find
Firmament-Autopilot/FMT-Firmware
Firmament Autopilot Embedded System
FMT is a model-based design autopilot for drones and autonomous vehicles, built on RT-Thread RTOS with a tight MATLAB/Simulink integration for algorithm development and auto code generation. It targets the Pixhawk hardware ecosystem and competes in the same space as PX4, with the differentiator being that control algorithms live in Simulink and get generated into C rather than being hand-written. For researchers and engineers who already live in Simulink, this is genuinely interesting.
The MBD workflow is the real pitch — you design and simulate your control loops in Simulink, then auto-generate C code that drops directly into the firmware. That loop from simulation to hardware is much tighter than PX4's hand-coded equivalent. The HAL layer is cleanly separated from drivers, which makes porting to new hardware less painful than it looks at first glance. IMU driver coverage is solid: ICM-42688P, BMI088, ICM-20948, MPU-6000, and several others, covering most of what you'll find on modern flight controllers. QEMU vexpress-a9 target means you can run and test firmware without hardware, which is genuinely useful for CI and algorithm iteration.
The community is a fraction of PX4's — 714 stars vs PX4's tens of thousands — which means when something breaks in an obscure hardware interaction, you're largely on your own. The Simulink dependency is a double-edged sword: if you don't have a MATLAB license (not cheap), the MBD workflow that defines this project is entirely inaccessible to you, and you're left with a PX4 alternative with a smaller community. Documentation lives at an external URL with no versioning visible in the repo, which is a warning sign for long-term maintainability. Only a handful of hardware targets are supported, and most are Chinese-market boards (SIEON S1, AMOV ICF5, CUAV) that are harder to source outside China.