OpenGCS is a professional-grade ground control station for ArduPilot and PX4 autonomous vehicles. Multi-vehicle operations, mission planning, real-time telemetry, AI-powered visual search, and native TAK interoperability — in a single compiled application for Windows and Linux.
Everything you need to plan, fly, and manage autonomous vehicle operations — from a single copter to coordinated multi-vehicle missions across ArduPilot and PX4 platforms.
Real-time vehicle control
Full fly view with real-time telemetry, attitude indicator, and instrument strip. Arm, takeoff, land, RTL, guided go-to, velocity control, and emergency procedures. Flight mode switching across all ArduPilot and PX4 modes.
Click, plan, upload, fly
Interactive waypoint placement with drag-to-reposition. Survey and grid pattern generator with camera overlap calculation. Conditional waypoints, terrain-aware altitude planning, and mission save/load in QGC WPL and GeoJSON formats.
User-supplied model framework
Abstraction layer supports YOLO, ONNX Runtime, or custom detection backends — bring your own model. Multi-target tracking with persistent IDs, thermal/night model switching, and live video overlay with detection bounding boxes.
Full vehicle configuration
Accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, RC, and ESC calibration with guided wizards. Full parameter editor with search, compare, and metadata. PID tuning interface, failsafe configuration, motor test, and CompassMot interference calibration.
8 tile sources, no internet required
Download and cache map tiles for field use. OpenStreetMap, OpenTopoMap, USGS Topo, USGS Imagery, USGS Hydro, and BLM Surface Management sources. MBTiles import/export for sharing map data with GridDown and AtlasRF deployments.
Test before you fly
Integrated ArduPilot and PX4 Software-in-the-Loop simulation. Auto-install SITL dependencies, launch multi-vehicle scenarios, inject weather and sensor failures. Full mission rehearsal without hardware.
Simultaneous fleet operations
Connect and control multiple vehicles simultaneously. Per-vehicle telemetry, independent mission execution, and fleet-wide status monitoring. Supports mixed ArduPilot and PX4 fleets with vehicle-specific parameter management.
GStreamer pipeline with FMV recording
RTSP, UDP, MPEG-TS, and file-based video streams with hardware-accelerated H.264/H.265 decoding. Telemetry HUD overlay on display without burn-in to recordings. FMV recording with MISB ST 0601 KLV metadata for mission replay and exploitation. OpenCV fallback when GStreamer is not installed.
Onboard intelligence for contested environments
The OpenGCS Edge Agent runs on the vehicle's companion computer alongside the autopilot. Low-latency command execution, pre-cached mission switchover in under 2 seconds, autonomous comms-loss handling with configurable escalation, and multi-vehicle peer coordination over mesh radio networks. Runs on EchoPilot AI, Raspberry Pi 5, NVIDIA Jetson, or any Linux SBC.
OpenGCS is delivered as a compiled native binary. No Python installation required. No source code distribution.
OpenGCS integrates natively with AtlasRF and GridDown for unified situational awareness across air, ground, and RF domains.
Live RF track ingestion — aircraft, vessels, and drones appear on your GCS map in real-time. Vehicle positions push to AtlasRF so your drones are visible across the entire monitoring network. Auto-registers vehicles as known/friendly to prevent self-alerting.
Export mission waypoints and search areas as GeoJSON for ground teams using GridDown. Import GridDown routes as mission waypoints. Share offline map tiles via MBTiles — download once, use across all three products in the field.
Native Cursor-on-Target broadcasting over UDP multicast. Vehicle positions, types, and status flow to any TAK-compatible endpoint. Full interoperability with ATAK, WinTAK, iTAK, and TAK Server deployments.
OpenGCS is available to qualified U.S. entities. Contact us for pricing, capability briefs, and evaluation licensing.