Ascend-8ToF | 360° Time-of-Flight Sensor

Ascend-8ToF is a compact 360° time-of-flight obstacle-sensing board that gives any drone a full ring of awareness of what's around it — front, back, and every side. It reads up to eight multizone ToF sensors and streams a live 512-point distance cloud over a single wire, so your aircraft can map, avoid, and fly safely indoors, in the dark, and in GPS-denied spaces where cameras and satellites fall short.

360° obstacle avoidance for any flight controller

Unlike a single forward-facing sensor, the Ascend-8ToF wraps the entire aircraft in a continuous sensing ring. Eight VL53L8CX sensors each measure an 8×8 grid of zones, combining into a 512-point cloud that refreshes 15 times a second — over 7,600 distance measurements per second. Because each point is its own true-depth reading, the board senses the shape of the space around the drone, not just a single distance.

Key specifications

• Coverage: continuous 360° horizontal ring
• Point cloud: 512 points per sweep (8 sensors × 8×8 zones)
• Update rate: 15 Hz (~7,680 measurements/second)
• Range: ~4 m reliable · ~45° field of view per sensor
• Interface: plain ASCII 8×8 distance matrices over UART (~921,600 baud, 8N1)
• Processor: STM32H5-family MCU with onboard sensor multiplexing
• Power: single DC input, 5 V up to a 6S LiPo (or 5 V USB-C), <500 mA typical
• Compatibility: any flight controller or companion computer (ModalAI VOXL2 worked example)

Two firmware modes

Sensor stream (stable): human-readable distance matrices over UART, ready to feed your own mapping, SLAM, or avoidance stack on PX4, ArduPilot, ROS, or custom code.

ACO onboard collision avoidance (beta): avoidance runs on the board itself and speaks MAVLink v2 straight to your flight controller — steering the drone around obstacles in Position and Mission modes with no companion computer required.

Built for GPS-denied and low-light flight

Active infrared time-of-flight sensing works in total darkness, dust, and enclosed environments where vision and GNSS fail — making the Ascend-8ToF ideal for indoor inspection, tunnels and confined spaces, warehouse and stockpile scanning, close-proximity and BVLOS operations, and multi-drone research and swarm work.

Engineered by drone people

Ascend Engineering builds production autonomy hardware and are upstream contributors to PX4 and QGroundControl. The 8ToF is designed to drop into a real airframe — a simple, host-agnostic distance stream with no proprietary ecosystem to buy into.

Give your drone eyes on every side. Add the Ascend-8ToF to your platform, or contact us about volume and fleet integration.

Read the 8TOF documentation here