Partner Program

NEPI for the Oregon UAS Accelerator

NEPI gives your team a common software foundation for the cohort, covering sensor integration, onboard AI, and mission automation as your system evolves.

Get NEPI See what teams get
What cohort teams get
$40,000

Two years of enterprise NEPI licensing, free, for every cohort team. Full commercial use, not a trial.

This program is available exclusively to Oregon UAS Accelerator cohort teams.

Why NEPI

Why NEPI for UAS startups

You don't need a large engineering team to build intelligent UAS systems. NEPI helps startups move from prototype to field-ready systems faster.

Instead of spending early months and dollars building foundational software to test and demo their concepts, Oregon UAS Accelerator teams can use NEPI along with the tutorials and community resources to jump start their efforts. This removes the need to create custom software infrastructure for hardware integration, data handling, edge AI orchestration, system automation, and user interfaces during the early stages.

Throughout the cohort, teams can use NEPI as an experimentation toolbox to validate, test, and demonstrate their solution, then harden that solution into a product-ready system they can start delivering to customers.

A single developer can accomplish in weeks what used to take a team of software engineers months.

What NEPI handles out of the box

Five systems you would otherwise have to build before you could test your first idea in flight.

Hardware integration

Plug-and-play hardware integration system for cameras, navigation, pan-tilt, and other common solution components.

Data management

Data management system for collecting, routing, and synchronizing system-wide data.

Onboard AI

Onboard AI management system for wrapping, deploying, and orchestrating custom AI models.

Automation and events

Low-code automation and event system for rapid application layer development and testing.

Device configuration

Device configuration system for managing network, time, software, drivers, applications, and other system-level functions.

What you can build with NEPI

How UAS teams put the platform to work during a cohort build.

Run AI models at the edge

Deploy computer vision and AI models onboard the aircraft for object detection, tracking, inspection, mapping, or situational awareness, without relying on the cloud.

Bring up live sensor and camera feeds

Stream and visualize cameras, LiDAR, GPS, IMUs, and other sensors with overlays for debugging, validation, and mission awareness.

Create low-code autonomy workflows

Trigger actions from AI outputs or sensor conditions, building detect, decide, and act pipelines without a full autonomy software team.

Run everything onboard

Operate fully in-field on platforms like NVIDIA Jetson, enabling real-time processing in GPS-denied or bandwidth-limited environments.

Case study

Lane Community College - Drone Search and Rescue

A student capstone project used NEPI to build an AI-based drone system for search and rescue scenarios. The team connected cameras, ran object detection models, and built automated monitoring workflows, all using NEPI's low-code tools on NVIDIA Jetson hardware.

Read the case study

Get started

Three steps to a running NEPI system on your hardware.

Get NEPI

Download the Docker container or install from source on your team's hardware.

Get started

Follow a tutorial

Walk through a complete project from hardware connection to AI deployment.

Browse tutorials

Join the community

Ask questions, share your build, and connect with other teams in your cohort.

Join Discord Community forum

Frequently asked questions

What UAS teams ask before they start building on NEPI.

NEPI acts as the integration and orchestration layer between sensors, onboard computing, AI models, and mission logic. It sits alongside your existing flight stack and payload software, handling data flow, automation, and edge AI execution without forcing you to redesign your system.
No. NEPI does not replace flight control, navigation, or autonomy frameworks. It complements them by providing a backseat driver interface to NEPI's AI and automation processes.
NEPI is designed for onboard edge AI. Teams can run AI models directly on the vehicle during flight, trigger actions based on the results, and evaluate outcomes immediately rather than relying only on post-processing.
Yes. Cohort teams receive full enterprise licensing for commercial use, not an evaluation or trial license.
No. NEPI is offered as a tool to accelerate development with no lock-in requirement. Teams can use it where it adds value, then extend or step away from it after the program based on their own roadmap.
NEPI is built for iteration. Teams commonly adjust sensors, AI models, automation logic, and data workflows by modifying the existing NEPI source code, or by adding new components on top of the base NEPI installation.
NEPI runs on common onboard compute platforms, including NVIDIA-based systems, and supports a wide range of sensors, pan-tilt units, navigation devices, and other common hardware components. The platform is hardware-agnostic and adapts to different airframes and payloads through a library of API interface classes, which lets separate subsystem efforts proceed with minimal coordination between teams.
No. Many teams use NEPI for vision-based workflows, but it also supports multisensor fusion, telemetry-driven automation, event-based data capture, and mission logic tied to onboard analytics.
NEPI is designed so teams do not need to be edge AI experts to get started. Much of the integration and orchestration is already handled, which lets teams focus on applying models and testing behavior rather than building infrastructure.
NEPI supports structured, time-synchronized and nav-synchronized data collection and processing across sensors, AI outputs, and system events. That makes it easier to evaluate performance, compare test runs, and support reporting during and after the cohort.

Go deeper on the architecture

The NEPI whitepapers cover the platform architecture and smart data capabilities in technical detail, for teams evaluating how NEPI fits their system design.

Read the whitepapers

Questions about the program?

Talk to the Numurus engineering team, or jump straight into the Discord channel set up for the Oregon UAS Accelerator community.

Contact us Join the Discord