# 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.

Repository: https://github.com/google/makani
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/makani
Language: C++
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: makani, wind, renewable-energy, energy-kites, wind-power
Archived: true
Last push: 2021-10-25T21:40:08+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 2298, "days_push": 1773, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, archived
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1205, forks 119 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:59.279753+00:00)

## What it is
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
- artifact type: application
- maturity: maintenance
- function: simulation, robotics, monitoring, embedded, data-visualization
- domain: simulation, robotics, embedded-systems, energy
- platform: cpp
- tags: airborne-wind-turbine, autopilot, flight-simulator, avionics-firmware, kite-power, opengl-visualizer, wind-energy, flight-controller, renewable-energy, energy-kites, linux, docker

## Member repositories
- google/makani (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:59.279753+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T06:19:35.111931+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/google/makani (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:59.279753+00:00, sha afb312c9e2f1)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.