Offline-first ground control station

Command every mission with confidence.

Plan, monitor and control autonomous flight from one modern interface. Built for the field: a laptop, a telemetry radio, and no internet.

Download Corvus GCS View on GitHub

macOS Linux Windows PX4 & ArduPilot

The Corvus GCS window: a satellite map with the home point, the flown track and the aircraft, the flight bar with arm, take-off, land and return-to-launch, the instrument panel showing heading and attitude, and the connection panel on the right.

Mission planning
Live telemetry
3D terrain
Drones & rovers
PX4 & ArduPilot

Features

Everything you need for autonomous flight.

Every one of these is built and working today.

Ready in seconds

On connect Corvus streams only what flying needs: position, attitude, GPS, battery and link health. The full parameter set is loaded when you open the Parameters page.

Plan precisely

Draw a take-off, waypoints, orbits and a landing on their own map, then read the whole flight as an altitude profile against the terrain under it. Save to disk, upload to the aircraft, fly on a second press.

See it in 3D

A spinnable globe when you zoom out; ground with its real shape and extruded OpenStreetMap buildings when you zoom in. The aircraft is drawn at the altitude it is actually flying.

Work offline

The interface loads nothing from the internet, and map tiles go into a local store as you use them. Download named regions ahead of time, elevation included, and the whole app keeps working with no connection.

Set up the aircraft

Your airframe drawn to scale, every motor at its real distance from the centre of gravity. Click one to wire, position or bench-test it. Parameters with their firmware defaults, guided calibration, PID tuning and firmware flashing sit beside it.

Review every flight

Download the vehicle's ULog files over MAVLink and read them in the built-in Flight Review, on your own machine. Telemetry that Corvus recorded itself reviews the same way, radio link included.

See every message

Live Messages lists every MAVLink message on the link with its rate, its age and its count. Pick one and its fields update live beside the list. Every parameter carries an explanation, even where the firmware ships none.

Extend it with plugins

A plugin is a folder: a script, a stylesheet, its own settings and its own translations. Four ship with Corvus and two more are a download away, from launch buttons for the companion computer to gates and trees placed on the map.

Speak your language

English, German and French, switched in Settings with no restart. A language is one file, so a new one needs no code, and a plugin brings its own words along.

Fly several vehicles

Give every vehicle a radio and a link of its own. Corvus draws each one on the map in its own colour, with its name and its track, flies the one you pick, and reports the warnings of the others. Take control switches in one press.

Drones, planes and rovers

Multicopters, planes, rovers and boats, on PX4 and on ArduPilot. A rover or a boat loses take-off and land, offers Drive to this point and lists its own modes, and every setup page shows the parameters that firmware really has.

Bring your own elevation

Load your own GeoTIFF, XYZ or ESRI ASCII grids, such as a survey office's 20 cm surface model (DOM) or terrain model (DGM), as one file or a folder of tiles. Corvus converts them once and serves them itself, so every tree and roof stands in the 3D map with no connection.

Screenshots

The real interface, driven by real MAVLink.

31 screenshots of flying, setting up the aircraft, reviewing the flight and the plugins. Select one to view it full size.

Fly

The live map, the mission planner, the geofence in flight, and the workspace beside the map.

The map filling the whole Corvus GCS window with the side panel collapsed, showing the vehicle, its heading, the home point, the flown track and the floating instrument panel. — **The map is the interface.** Collapse the side panel and the whole window becomes the operational picture, with the instrument panel wherever you put it.

The Home map with three vehicles at once: a quadrotor called Bumble in the theme red flying a curved track, a second quadrotor called Zippy in blue on a gentle curve along the north of the field, and a rover called Rollo in green driving snaking lines across the meadow, each with its name under the marker. — **Drones and a rover, one map.** Each vehicle has a radio and a link of its own, its own colour, its name under the marker and a track behind it.

The Vehicles dialog in the blue theme listing Bumble in control, and Zippy and Rollo each with a Take control button, with their mode, battery and height, and the three links below with a field to open another one. — **Take control in one press.** Every vehicle the station hears is listed with its mode, battery and link, and the HUD, the flight bar and every page follow the one you pick.

The map tilted into 3D in the blue theme over a 20 cm surface model made of three DOM tiles: the field with its rows of trees in relief, the buildings around it with their real roofs, the flown track, and the aircraft drawn above the ground at its altitude. — **See it in 3D.** Three 20 cm DOM tiles from the survey office as the ground: every tree, every roof, and the aircraft at the altitude it is flying.

The map tilted into 3D over the operator's own 20 cm surface model: the field with its trees and the roofs around it in relief, the geofence as a dashed outline along the field's edge, the flown track and the aircraft at its altitude. — **The geofence in 3D.** The same surface model, with the geofence along the edge of the field and the flown track inside it.

Plan the flight. A start point, waypoints, an orbit and the return, with the altitude profile underneath.

The Home map during a flight with the side panel collapsed: the geofence drawn as a dashed amber outline around the field, the flown track inside it and the instrument panel. — **The fence in sight.** The geofence as a dashed outline under the flown track, so the edge is on the map while you fly.

The MAVLink console open in the right-hand workspace next to the live map, listing timestamped messages with a command field underneath. — **The side workspace.** A MAVLink console, an SSH terminal for a companion computer, and a plugin slot, right next to the map.

Two SSH sessions during a flight: one to the companion computer in the side panel and one to the payload computer in a floating window over the map. — **On the companion computer.** A real SSH terminal in the side panel, and a second one in a window of its own over the map.

Corvus GCS in German during a flight: the top bar, the flight bar, the instrument panel and the connection panel all labelled in German, beside the map with the flown track. — **In your language.** English, German and French, one file each. Every page follows the language you pick.

Corvus GCS in flight in the dark green theme: the satellite map with the flown track, the instrument panel and the connection panel. — **Six themes.** Two light and four dark. Switching is instant, and the map, the plots and the instruments all follow.

Set up

Calibration, radio, the geofence, tuning, motors, battery, safety and every parameter.

The Motors setup page: a quadrotor airframe drawn to scale with numbered motors, their MAIN output pins and spin-direction arrows. — **Your airframe, drawn.** Every motor at its real distance from the centre of gravity, with its output pin and spin direction.

The Radio Control page: a handset drawn with its sticks, switches and knobs, each labelled with its channel and position, and a live bar for all sixteen channels beside it. — **The transmitter, drawn.** Sticks, six switches and two knobs, each one live against the channel bound to it.

The Geofence card on the Safety and Sensors page: an eight-corner area along the edge of the field on a satellite map, its size, the action when leaving it, and the line saying the vehicle has this area. — **Draw the geofence.** The area the aircraft may fly in, on a map of its own, uploaded as an inclusion fence with the action when it is left.

The geofence on the large map in the blue theme: the eight corners of the area along the field as handles, a handle in the middle of every edge, and the Redraw, Delete area and Done buttons above. — **Edit it on the large map.** Drag a corner, add one in the middle of an edge, or draw the area again, on a map that fills the window.

The accelerometer calibration page, with the aircraft drawn in each of the six orientations PX4 asks for and the completed ones ticked off. — **Guided calibration.** Each position is shown as a drawing. Hold the aircraft the way the bird is held.

The PID Tuning page during a flight: live roll, pitch and yaw rate plots above the rate controller gains, which are read only while armed. — **Tune in flight.** Rate, attitude, velocity and position gains by hand, with the live response drawn above them, plus the in-flight autotune.

The Battery and Power page: the pack drawn with its warning thresholds and per-cell voltages, its live readings, and the settings for how Corvus reads it. — **Know the pack.** Cells, capacity, the power module, and which charge reading the rest of the interface flies by.

The Safety and Sensors page: the maximum distance and height, the action at the limit, and the return-to-launch type and heights. — **Limits and failsafes.** Maximum distance and height, the return profile, and an action for every loss PX4 can detect.

The parameter editor in the pink theme, filtered to the modified parameters: battery and sensor calibration values, each next to its PX4 default and a reset button. — **Every parameter.** Only the values this aircraft changed, each beside its PX4 default with a button to restore it. Here in the pink theme.

The parameter editor in the blue theme with the information popover of the battery failsafe open: what the parameter does, its default and the values it takes. — **Every parameter explained.** The circled i beside a name says what it does, its default, its range and its values.

Review

Logs downloaded from the aircraft and read on this computer, and every message on the live link. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Flight Review plots of pitch angle and pitch rate, estimate against setpoint, with the takeoff, mission, loiter and return phases shaded behind the traces. — **Estimate against setpoint.** Every plot carries the flight modes behind it, from the takeoff through the mission to the return.

The Live Messages view of the Analysis page: every MAVLink message type on the link with its rate, age and count, and the fields of ATTITUDE listed beside the table. — **See every message.** Every MAVLink message type on the link with its rate, its age and its count, and the live fields of the one you pick.

Plugins

Four ship with Corvus, two more install from their own repositories. Each one runs beside the map.

The Map Entities plugin beside the map: a gate across the flown track, two trees beside it, a radar sector and the people at the start, with the gate selected in the plugin's list and editor. — **Map Entities.** Gates, trees and devices with a range, placed on the map. The aircraft's pass through the gate is checked as it flies.

The map with a curved flown track across a field, the instrument panel, and the Vibration Monitor plugin in the side workspace charting gyro and accelerometer vibration live. — **Vibration Monitor.** Gyro and accelerometer vibration charted live, with the clipping counters beside it.

The SSH Launcher plugin with four buttons, two of them running on the companion computer, and the mission script's terminal open in a window over the map. — **SSH Launcher.** The mission script, the recorder and the gimbal on the companion computer, one press each, each in a terminal of its own.

The Schwalby plugin in the dark green theme: the companion computer's status above a shelf of buttons that run on this laptop or over SSH, two of them running. — **Schwalby.** Buttons that start a program on this laptop or on the companion computer, with the companion's status above them.

The NuttX Console plugin in the orange theme: the PX4 shell over MAVLink showing the output of ver all, param show and listener sensor_combined beside the map. — **NuttX Console.** NSH on the flight controller over the telemetry link: ver, free, listener and every other builtin, with no cable.

The Trajectory Viewer plugin: a planned route read from a file drawn in pink under the flown track, with the file, its coordinate frame and colour in the side panel. — **Trajectory Viewer.** A route from a file, drawn under the flown track, so you see at a glance where the aircraft leaves it.

Every screenshot is the real interface driven by real MAVLink: telemetry, parameters and the flown track all arrive over the wire. The aircraft producing them is simulated, not airborne, and the imagery is the Neubiberg test site. The pictures on this page use all six themes that ship.

Technical

What it talks to, and what it runs on.

A Python backend and a web frontend in one standalone desktop application. No server to deploy, no browser tab to manage.

Corvus GCS technical specifications
Autopilots	PX4 v1.16 · v1.17 · v1.18 as the primary target; ArduPilot 4.3 to 4.6 for Copter, Plane, Rover/Boat and Sub. Several vehicles connect at once, one link each: you fly one and see the others on the map. A rover or a boat gets its own controls.
Links	MAVLink over a serial telemetry radio, UDP or TCP. A USB flight controller, a SiK radio or the ground-station UDP port is found and taken automatically at launch, with link-quality display and automatic reconnect.
RTK GPS	A base station plugged into the same computer is detected and surveyed in, and RTCM 3 corrections stream to the aircraft. An NTRIP caster works the same way over the network.
Video	The aircraft's camera over RTSP (decoded with ffmpeg) or WebRTC from a media server such as MediaMTX, in floating windows you can move to a second screen. A frozen picture is greyed out, never passed off as live.
Maps & 3D	MapLibre GL JS with 6 map services with 20 layers (two of them on your own API key), terrain relief and extruded OpenStreetMap buildings. Tiles are cached to a local offline store, and named regions can be downloaded in advance with their elevation. Your own GeoTIFF, XYZ or ESRI ASCII surface models load as the ground.
Flight logs	ULog .ulg download and review in the built-in Flight Review; ArduPilot DataFlash .bin downloads but is not parsed. Corvus's own telemetry recording reviews on both stacks.
Tools	MAVLink console, SSH terminal to a companion computer, and a plugin folder. The Vibration Monitor, the SSH Launcher, Schwalby (buttons that run on this computer or over SSH) and Map Entities (trees, gates and devices with a range, placed on the map) are included. The NuttX Console (the PX4 shell over MAVLink, as a console or in a terminal window) and the Trajectory Viewer (a reference route from a file, drawn under the flown track) install from their own repositories.
Platforms	macOS 15 or later on Apple Silicon .dmg, Linux x86_64 .AppImage, Windows x64 .zip. Nothing else to install: Python, Qt and every dependency are inside.
From source	Python 3.12+ and one command, ./run.sh. The frontend is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript; the desktop shell is PySide6.
License	Sustainable Use License 1.0 (fair-code). The source is open to read, modify and build on, for internal, personal and non-commercial use, but not to resell.

Read the documentation Install and run

Why I built this

The ground stations I used did not quite fit.

They did the job, but they got in the way. They load every parameter before you can do anything, feel slow on a field laptop, and leave log review to separate tools. I wanted a station that is ready in seconds, fetches parameters only when I open them, has a flight reviewer built in, and gets the small details right, in simulation as much as on a real aircraft. And because no station covers every setup, you can write your own plugins and extend it yourself.

In my day-to-day work as a PhD researcher there is very little room for AI-assisted, “vibe-coded” development, because the setting simply does not allow for it. That method is nonetheless becoming a real part of how software gets built, and the only honest way to find out where it works, where it breaks, and how to direct it well is to use it seriously on something non-trivial.

Download

Ready for your next mission?

Download the latest Corvus GCS release or explore the source code on GitHub.

Releases are published on GitHub.

Download latest release Browse source code

macOS Apple Silicon · macOS 15+ · .dmg Not notarized. Allow it once under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
Linux x86_64 · .AppImage Mark it executable and run it. No system Python or Qt needed.
Windows x64 · .zip Unzip anywhere and run it. Unsigned, so SmartScreen asks once.