GhostPilot: Build a GPS-Denied Drone Navigation Stack with Visual SLAM + Agentic AI

"Fly to the third floor, check each room for occupants, land at the helipad." — What if your drone could actually understand this?

By Aman Sachan | GitHub: AmSach/GhostPilot

🚀 What You'll Build

In this comprehensive guide, you'll build GhostPilot — an open-source drone navigation system that:

Works without GPS using Visual-Inertial SLAM (VINS-Mono)

Understands natural language missions via an LLM-based agent

Navigates autonomously using ROS2 Nav2 stack

Runs on edge hardware (Jetson Orin / Raspberry Pi 5)

📋 Table of Contents

The Problem: GPS is Fragile

System Architecture

Prerequisites & Setup

Part 1: Visual-Inertial SLAM

Part 2: Mission Parser (Agentic AI)

Part 3: Nav2 Integration & Pose Bridge

Part 4: End-to-End Simulation

Production Readiness Checklist

What's Next

The Problem: GPS is Fragile

Before we dive into code, let's understand why this matters.

Where GPS Fails

Environment GPS Behavior…