Connecting to the drone
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Pathfinder Copilot communicates with the drone over SSH (for mission control) and UDP (for live telemetry and detections). Both are established when you sign in via the Drone Connection card on the Plan tab.
Find the drones ip
Once the drone is powered on and joined to your network, log into the Jetson directly (over the on-board console or your usual SSH path) and run:
Look for the IP address on the network interface you're using — typically wlan0 for Wi-Fi or eth0 for wired. That's the address you'll enter in the Copilot app.
Open the Drone Connection card
With the app launched and the Single tab selected at the top, navigate to the Plan sub-tab. The first card on the left is Drone Connection.
What "connected" looks like
A successful connect takes 1–3 seconds. When it lands, the card updates to show the active session:
The status pill in the top-right flips from idle to OK.
An SSH row appears with the Jetson IP, marked green.
A UDP row appears, usually with a warn badge — that's normal until the drone-side run_pfa starts and begins sending UDP telemetry. It will turn green once you Run the mission on the Fly tab.
The Connect button changes to Disconnect.
What happens behind the scenes
The Connect button does several things in sequence:
Opens an SSH session to the Jetson.
Starts an interactive shell over that session — every subsequent action (Run mission, Stop, hardware checks) sends commands into that shell.
Discovers where pfa-edge is installed on this specific drone (the path varies by image), so subsequent mission pushes know where to write mission.json.
Probes for any leftover run_pfa processes on the drone — if a previous Copilot session was killed (laptop crash, Wi-Fi drop, force-quit) the drone may still be running its mission. If found, the orphan is killed cleanly so the new session starts from a known idle state.
Disconnecting
Click Disconnect on the Drone Connection card. The backend sends Ctrl-C to any running mission, waits briefly for it to exit, then closes the SSH channel. The status pill returns to idle and the footer dot turns grey.
Connecting to a different drone
To switch drones, disconnect from the current one and Connect again with a new IP / user / password. The app supports one drone at a time in Single mode; if you need multiple drones simultaneously, use Swarm mode.
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