Mission Planning
The Mission Planner is where you build, edit, and upload autonomous missions. It covers manual waypoints, area and corridor surveys, terrain-aware altitude planning, and multi-format export. Every mission is organized into groups, so a large plan stays readable instead of becoming one flat list of hundreds of waypoints.
Every waypoint belongs to a group. A group is either a manual group (waypoints you place by hand) or a survey group (waypoints generated from a polygon or centerline). Groups give each part of a mission its own identity.
Each group header shows:
- A colored swatch. Click it to recolor the group on the map and in the list.
- The group name. Double-click to rename.
- A visibility checkbox to show or hide that group on the map without removing it.
- Per-block stats: total distance, estimated flight time, and ground sample distance for survey groups.
- A per-group action to upload only that group to the flight controller, or save only that group to a file.
- An Edit button on survey groups that reopens the group in the Survey panel for live editing.
ArduPilot holds a single flat mission, so on upload all visible groups are flattened into one contiguous waypoint list. Downloading a mission from the vehicle brings it back as one imported group.
The planner keeps a full edit history. Use the undo and redo buttons in the toolbar, or Cmd/Ctrl+Z and Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Z. The working mission is also autosaved continuously, so if the app closes mid-plan it is recovered on the next launch.
Use the Survey button's neighbours on the map toolbar to place waypoints by hand. For air vehicles the first waypoint also prepends a takeoff command so the mission is immediately uploadable. Ground and surface vehicles skip the takeoff.
Click the Survey button on the map toolbar, then draw a polygon. ArduDeck fills the polygon with a flight pattern and computes the camera coverage.
Patterns:
- Grid: parallel back-and-forth scan lines.
- Crosshatch: two perpendicular grid passes for higher photo density and better 3D reconstruction.
- Circular: concentric rings around the centroid.
- Spiral and Perimeter + Fill: ground-vehicle patterns for rovers and mowers.
Surveyors think in ground sample distance, not altitude. Switch Plan by to GSD and type a target in cm per pixel. ArduDeck back-solves the altitude from your camera and keeps it in sync. Switch back to Altitude to drive the height directly.
The survey panel shows live job numbers as you tune: photo count, line count, flight distance and time, covered area, estimated number of batteries, and an approximate captured-data size.
Front and side overlap, grid angle, and overshoot live under Advanced. Altitude Reference selects the frame the waypoints fly in:
- Relative: height above the home position.
- Terrain: height above the terrain at each point.
- ASL: height above mean sea level.
For photogrammetry it helps to fly the two crosshatch directions at two different altitudes. With the crosshatch pattern selected, set the second-pass altitude offset as a percentage of the relative height. The perpendicular pass then flies higher, which improves 3D reconstruction.
When a survey is longer than one battery, the panel offers to split it into one battery-sized flight per sortie. Each flight becomes its own group with its own takeoff and return, independently uploadable from the list.
Corridors are linear surveys that follow a path rather than fill an area: roads, railways, power lines, pipelines, and motorways. Click the Corridor button on the map toolbar and draw a centerline. ArduDeck lays parallel flight strips along it.
Corridor settings:
- Mode: Plane or Copter. Plane adds end overshoot and racetrack turn waypoints at sharp bends, so a fixed wing has room to turn without cutting the corner. Copter turns on the spot, so it skips both.
- Width and Strips: the swath width, and the number of parallel strips. An odd strip count rides the centerline, an even count straddles it.
- Side offset: shift the whole strip bundle to one side of the centerline.
- Max turn angle: bends sharper than this get the racetrack turn waypoints in Plane mode.
- Flip legs and Invert path: reverse the strip order or the travel direction.
Instead of tracing a boundary by hand, import it. ArduDeck reads KML, KMZ, and GeoJSON files and creates one survey group per polygon, with inner rings kept as no-fly holes. The map fits to the imported area so you can start tuning immediately.
The Altitude Profile panel plots your route against the terrain underneath it, with the safe altitude buffer drawn in. When the route dips below the safe altitude, ArduDeck flags a terrain collision and offers a one-click fix:
- The terrain collision indicator in the toolbar opens the Auto Adjust dialog.
- The upload confirmation also offers Fix Altitudes before you send an unsafe mission.
Auto Adjust raises waypoints to clear terrain, and where simply raising them is not enough to clear a ridgeline, it inserts intermediate waypoints to carve a safe corridor above the ground.
The Save menu in the toolbar covers every destination for a plan:
- Save to Library: keep the whole plan inside ArduDeck, groups and surveys intact and editable.
- Waypoints file (.waypoints): QGC WPL format, compatible with ArduPilot and Mission Planner.
- QGC Plan (.plan): QGroundControl plan format.
Use Open to load a mission from a file. Upload to the flight controller with the FC upload button, or upload a single group from its header. File operations use disk and folder icons, and flight controller transfers use up and down arrows, so the two are easy to tell apart.
- Map Overlays for weather, airspace, and DIPUL geozones on the planning map.
- Safety and Failsafe for arming checks and geofence.