MERIDIAN RTOS
A Real-Time Operating System Built for Flight.
Meridian RTOS is BIG-G Aerospace’s ground-up real-time operating system, purpose-built for the demands of autonomous and remotely piloted flight computers. Where general-purpose operating systems compromise on determinism, Meridian doesn’t — every scheduling decision, every interrupt, every task hand-off is engineered for predictable, repeatable timing behavior, because in flight-critical systems “usually fast enough” isn’t good enough.
BUILT FOR THE MISSION, NOT ADAPTED FROM ONE
Meridian is not a stripped-down desktop kernel or a hobbyist project repurposed for aerospace. It is designed from first principles for unmanned and remotely piloted platforms — a preemptive, priority-driven architecture that guarantees critical flight tasks get the CPU cycles they need, when they need them, without the unpredictability that general-purpose schedulers accept as a tradeoff.
DETERMINISTIC BY DESIGN
Preemptive, priority-based task scheduling with guaranteed response times for mission-critical operations
A synchronization and communication layer purpose-built for real-time coordination between flight subsystems
Continuous, autonomous system health monitoring — built to detect and contain anomalies in flight, with no ground operator required to intervene
A minimal, auditable footprint — no unnecessary abstraction layers between your code and the hardware it controls
BUILT FOR THE FIELD, NOT JUST THE BENCH
Meridian is designed around real operational constraints: secure, resilient communication links, in-field software updates without grounding the aircraft, and a growing set of sensor and actuator integrations for the systems that keep an aircraft flying — not a lab demo, a foundation for fielded hardware.
AN EVOLVING PLATFORM
Meridian RTOS is under active, iterative development by BIG-G Aerospace, with a clear roadmap toward full hardware-level task isolation and an expanding set of avionics-grade subsystem integrations. We’re building in the open with real hardware, real testing, and real engineering discipline — not slideware.
We develop Meridian twice, on purpose: an independent C implementation and a from-scratch Rust implementation, built and tested in parallel from the same design — with portability to additional processor architectures already on the roadmap.
Interested in learning more, evaluating Meridian for your platform, or discussing partnership opportunities?