QGroundControl — The Complete Guide: A Ground Station for PX4 and ArduPilot Drones for Mapping and Surveys
QGroundControl is an open-source ground control station app for any vehicle that speaks MAVLink, especially PX4 and ArduPilot autopilots — multirotors, fixed-wing and VTOL. It is maintained under the Linux Foundation’s Dronecode project and runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android.
QGroundControl
Dronecode Project
Ground control station for PX4 and ArduPilot drones — mission planning, area surveys and corridor scans for photogrammetry and mapping.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Full flight control — monitoring and commanding the vehicle.
- Vehicle setup — configuring the autopilot.
- Mission planning — on a map, in the plan view.
- Survey — a ready pattern for area coverage in aerial photography.
- Corridor Scan — scanning along a road or infrastructure alignment.
Why engineers care
The Survey and Corridor Scan patterns save planning flight lines by hand, and they are especially useful for photogrammetric mapping of sites, roads and infrastructure lines. The photos are then processed in photogrammetry software into a map, an elevation model or a point cloud. The software is available under Apache-2.0 or GPL-3.0, at your choice.
Related tools
For a ground station dedicated to ArduPilot — Mission Planner. For processing drone photos — WebODM or Meshroom.
Mission Planner
ArduPilot (Michael Oborne)
Ground control station for ArduPilot drones and vehicles — map-based mission planning, autopilot setup, telemetry and log analysis.
Get it from the vendor
WebODM (OpenDroneMap)
OpenDroneMap
Photogrammetry from drone imagery — orthophoto, elevation model, point cloud and textured 3D model.
Get it from the vendor
Meshroom
AliceVision
Turns a set of photographs into a textured 3D model — photogrammetry, free.
Get it from the vendor
COLMAP
COLMAP developers (Johannes Schönberger)
Photogrammetry from photos — Structure-from-Motion and Multi-View Stereo to build 3D point clouds and models.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
QGroundControl is a free, convenient ground station that runs on almost any device. Anyone mapping with a drone will benefit especially from its ready-made survey patterns.