Status and Roadmap

MAVLink-M is a public draft. Message IDs are stable once assigned, but message layouts can still change until the standard freezes in November 2026. Feedback closes at the freeze, so now is the time to check that the messages your systems need are there and right.

What the draft means for implementers

• A change that would break an existing sender or receiver is marked with ! in its commit subject, and its commit body says what implementations must change. Commit subjects also make up the changelog of the generated C library.
• Build against a pinned revision of military.xml or of the C library, and check the changes marked with ! before moving to a newer one.

Roadmap

Phase	When	What happens
Draft feedback	August to September 2026	Done: review of the public draft
Path to stable	September to November 2026	The feedback is worked through, and the standard freezes in November
Validation baseline	November 2026 to January 2027	A multi-vendor range demonstration, and a self-validation toolkit for checking an implementation
Continued work	2027 onward	Further messages and extensions, through the same public process

How it started

• May 7, 2026: kickoff in Washington, D.C., with defense vendors, drone makers and government in one room.
• Twelve weeks later: a 48-hour hackathon, where 14 companies built 7 working integrations.

Take part

Join the working group on the MAVLink-M mailing list, and see Contributing to propose a change.