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Kite Ground Control Kite Ground Control

Kite Ground Control (Kite GC) is a modern, cross-platform ground control station for INAV, ArduPilot, and PX4 aircraft — planes, multirotors, VTOL, helicopters, rovers and boats. It combines everything you expect from a GCS with a fast, intuitive interface and a few things you won't find anywhere else — like a full 3D flight view, a fleet & battery manager, and live video right next to the map.

Kite Ground Control in 3D mode

Kite Ground Control flying in 3D mode.

Highlights

  • Immersive 3D flight view

    A full 3D globe with real terrain, your aircraft and track in 3D, a 3D mission overlay, an FPV cockpit camera, and real-time day/night lighting — switch between 2D and 3D seamlessly.

  • One GCS for INAV, ArduPilot & PX4

    Plan, fly, and log across all three autopilots with a consistent interface — including passive (listen-only) and relay link modes.

  • Fleet, Battery & Mission managers

    Keep a library of your aircraft and batteries with full build sheets and lifetime stats, and a reusable mission library — all linked to your flight log.

  • Fast & intuitive

    A performance-oriented interface with dockable widgets and panels that remembers your layout, so the focus stays on flying.

Supported setups

  • Autopilots: INAV (7.0+), ArduPilot, and PX4.
  • Aircraft: fixed-wing, flying-wing, VTOL, multirotor, helicopter, rover, boat.
  • Connections: USB / serial, Bluetooth (SPP & BLE), TCP, and UDP.
  • Link modes: live control link, passive listen-only telemetry, or a relay that re-broadcasts to other ground stations.

The essentials

Everything you'd expect from a ground station:

  • Live telemetry & HUD — attitude, altitude, speed (incl. airspeed), a compass with wind and ground-track indicators, GPS/sensor health, link quality, and flight-mode display.
  • Customisable widget dashboard — drag-and-drop flight widgets docked to the side and bottom.
  • 2D moving map — your aircraft, track, home and mission, with heading-up mode and day/night shading.
  • Mission planning — create, upload, download and edit missions; undo/redo; survey-pattern generator; terrain-following / AGL waypoints.
  • Vehicle control — arm/disarm, flight-mode changes, takeoff/RTL/loiter and more (ArduPilot/PX4).
  • Comfort — a multi-language interface (English, German and French at launch; more to follow) and persistent window, layout and settings between sessions.

What makes Kite special

  • Full 3D mode — Cesium 3D globe with real terrain, a unified 3D mission overlay, an FPV cockpit camera with a conformal HUD, and live day/night lighting.
  • Terrain awareness — AGL (above-ground) waypoints, a terrain-profile analysis for your mission, and live terrain radar / AGL widgets in flight.
  • Flight Logbook — a full flight logbook no other GCS offers: automatic recording with replay, plus import of INAV blackbox, ArduPilot Dataflash, MAVLink .tlog, and MWPTools-compatible raw-MSP logs — unified into one searchable flight history.
  • Fleet (Vehicle) Manager — a build sheet per aircraft (airframe, propulsion, FC, sensors, photo) with lifetime statistics and records, auto-linked to your flights; export/import as .kvehicle.
  • Battery Manager — track each pack by serial: cycles, lifetime usage and health, with .kbatt export/import.
  • Mission Manager — a searchable mission library shared across autopilots.
  • Safety suite — geofences (ArduPilot/PX4), geozones (INAV), safe-home & fixed-wing autoland, airspace overlays (airports, controlled airspace, obstacles), and foreign-vehicle radar with ADS-B proximity & conflict alerts.
  • Live video — low-latency RTSP video shown alongside (or behind) the map, with one-click map ⇄ video swapping.
  • Telemetry relay — re-encode and forward live telemetry to other ground stations, handsets, or an antenna tracker.
  • RC control — fly from the GCS with a gamepad/joystick (HID).
  • RF link analysis — visualise signal quality to find the best antenna setup.

Where to start

Kite GC is free, open-source software (GPL-3.0-or-later).