google/makani
Makani was a project to develop a commercial-scale airborne wind turbine, culminating in a flight test of the Makani M600 off the coast of Norway. All Makani software has now been open-sourced. This repository contains the working Makani flight simulator, controller (autopilot), visualizer, and command center flight monitoring tools. Additionally, almost all avionics firmware is also included, albeit potentially not in a buildable state, due to the removal of some third-party proprietary code. We hope that this code will be inspirational and useful to the kite-based windpower and wider communities. observed · 2026-08-28
Health v2 · maintenance only
10/100
- Activity 0
- Release rhythm 35
- Longevity 100
Flags: no_releases archived
How is this computed?
round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10) — computed 2026-09-03. Adoption (stars, forks) is never an input.
- gap_med: n/a
- age_days: 2298
- days_rel: n/a
- days_push: 1773
- n_releases_24m: 0
Adoption not part of the score
1205 stars · 119 forks observed · 2026-08-28
What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded
The open-sourced software stack from Google X's Makani project, which developed a commercial-scale airborne wind turbine (energy kite). It includes a working flight simulator, autopilot controllers, an OpenGL visualizer, flight monitoring tools, and most of the avionics firmware.
Use cases
- simulate the flight of an airborne wind turbine or energy kite
- study the control algorithms for a kite-based wind power system
- learn how autopilot flight controllers are implemented for tethered aircraft
- explore avionics firmware for winches, ground stations, motors, and sensors
- visualize the state of a flight system during simulation or real flight
When to choose
- you are researching or building kite-based or airborne wind energy systems
- you want a real-world reference for flight control and autopilot software
- you need a flight simulator and visualizer for tethered-wing dynamics
- you want to study production-grade avionics firmware examples
When to avoid
- you need a maintained, actively developed tool with support for modern OS versions
- you want a turnkey wind turbine simulation without deep customization
- you need buildable avionics firmware out of the box, since some proprietary third-party code was removed
- your platform is Windows or macOS without Docker, as the code targets Debian Linux
Facets
application · maturity maintenance
simulation robotics monitoring embedded data-visualization simulation robotics embedded-systems energy cpp airborne-wind-turbine autopilot flight-simulator avionics-firmware kite-power opengl-visualizer wind-energy flight-controller renewable-energy energy-kites linux docker
1 source
- readme: https://github.com/google/makani · fetched 2026-08-28 · afb312c9e2f1
Member repositories
| Repository | Role | Health v2 |
|---|---|---|
| google/makani | main | 10 |
For agents
Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00 · Report a problem