The Beginning

‍Karshipta started as two things at once.

One of NIKX's contributors, Amir, wanted to learn C++ properly and asked for a real project to build on, not a toy exercise. At the same time, we'd been circling an older idea for years: a platform for deploying true multi-agent drone systems, something we once called Aurora. ROS was always the tool everyone reached for, and it was always the wall, heavy to run, harder still to reason about unless you were already deep in robotics.

Looking at what serious fleet control actually costs in the defense and enterprise world- thousands of euros a month- closed, tied to onevendor's hardware, impossible to self-host, made the gap obvious. Nobody building a real product needed to accept that as the only option.

We also had a problem that only NIKX could solve. Physical drones carrying real software are a real-world attack surface, not just a network diagram. Relayly, already built to keep our own devices talking securely when the internet itself couldn't be trusted, turned out to be exactly the answer: self-hosted, end-to-end encrypted, no dependency on infrastructure we didn't control. Karshipta and Relayly grew into each other from there.

Between Amir's project and Aurora finally having real ground to stand on, Karshipta was born.

The Name

Karshipta is the Avestan bird said to be the chief of all birds, the messenger that kept an isolated refuge connected to the outside world. That's exactly the job we needed something to do: watch over a scattered fleet and keep every one of them connected back to the person responsible for them.

The Vision

Karshipta connects to real or simulated wards, drones over MAVLink, trackers over Herald, our own open standard for anything without an autopilot, and gives you one live web console to organize, monitor, and task the whole fleet.

It is your operator's tower, in your own browser:

Group wards into Fleets, wherever they are, whatever they are.

Draw Zones, keep-in or keep-out, directly on the map.

Dispatch a Fleet Mission where every ward gets its own independentlyplanned route, not one shared route broadcast to everyone.

Run it entirely on your own infrastructure, no cloud dependency,ever, unless you choose one.

Why It Matters

Most fleet software makes you choose: a hobbyist tool that stops working past one vehicle, or an enterprise platform you can't self-host and can't see inside of. Karshipta is neither. It's a real, open, protocol-first platform built to run your fleet the way you actually operate it, not the way a vendor decided you should.

It is perfect for:

Drone service operators running survey, inspection, or agriculturefleets

Research and robotics teams working with multiple vehicles at once

Agtech and livestock operations tracking herds across open terrain

Anyone who wants full fleet visibility without handing their data tosomeone else's cloud

Our Journey So Far

Shipped v0.1.0, the first public release

Multi-ward MAVLink connectivity through the gateway, live telemetry,a full command lifecycle

Fleet, Zone, and Fleet Mission built as first-class objects, not UIoverlays

Herald, our open standard for non-flight wards, extracted into itsown independent spec

One-command demo: three simulated wards flying in your browser inunder 60 seconds

Built on Relayly for encrypted, self-hosted transport end to end

Redesigned the mission model before release once we realized theoriginal approach, one shared route fanned out to every ward at once,was a collision risk, not a simplification worth keeping

The Road Ahead

We are just getting started. Future plans include:

ArduPilot support

Telemetry persistence and flight log review

Multi-operator sessions

Video feeds from onboard cameras

Additional ward domains: ground, surface, underwater

Geofence enforcement pushed directly to the ward's own autopilot

Real multi-agent coordination on top of Fleet Missions, collisiondetection, smarter fleet behavior, the original Aurora idea, nowwith a real foundation under it

Our Commitment

Karshipta is AGPL-3.0, and everything a single operator needs to run their own fleet stays free, forever: connectivity, telemetry, commands, missions, zones, the demo environment. What we build commercially sits on top, hosting, organizational scale, compliance, never features clawed back from the open core.

It's simulation-first and still early. We say so plainly, in the README, every time.

‍Made with 💛 in Amsterdam