A companion computer is a device that travels on-board the vehicle and controls/communicates with the autopilot over a low-latency link. Apps running on a companion computer can perform computationally intensive or time-sensitive tasks, and add much greater intelligence than is provided by the autopilot alone.
DroneKit can be used with onboard computers running variants of Linux that support both Python and the installation of Python packages from the Internet. The following computing platforms are known to work with DroneKit, and are supported by the ArduPilot developer community.