Upbeat Launches Bluemag Pi AI Flight Controller for Autonomous Vehicles

Summary

Upbeat Technology has launched Bluemag Pi, a sensor-integrated flight controller for long-endurance fixed-wing aircraft, commercial multirotor drones, and unmanned surface vessels. The board is built around Upbeat's UP301 system-on-chip, which combines SiFive E3 and E2 RISC-V processor cores in a dual-core architecture. Upbeat says the design separates flight-critical control from communication, navigation, system management, and AI tasks to support responsiveness and reliability. Bluemag Pi runs Apache NuttX and is compatible with PX4, ArduPilot, and Betaflight, while providing RAM, nonvolatile storage, floating-point hardware, timers, DMA, and interrupt resources for flight operations. Its sensing package includes two independent IMUs, a barometer, and dual GNSS receivers; sensor-fusion software cross-checks readings to maintain altitude, attitude, and velocity estimates if one sensor drifts or fails. The board supports MAVLink telemetry, common remote-control receivers, an integrated four-in-one electronic speed controller, expansion peripherals, and continuous flight-data logging. Engineers can buy the standard board for secondary development or purchase the UP301 chip for proprietary carrier-board designs. With appropriate hardware and firmware integration, the platform supports manual, stabilized, altitude-hold, position-hold, mission, return-to-home, and autonomous modes. Upbeat says Bluemag Pi is available now through its website and will be demonstrated at CEATEC 2026 in Japan from October 13 to 16, followed by an appearance at TAITRONICS & AIoT Taiwan from October 20 to 22.