Skip to main content

Replay Drone Flights in 3D with Flight Review

Sarah Chow

PX4 is an open source autopilot for drones and other unmanned vehicles. As part of that ecosystem, Flight Reviewis a web service that allows anyone to upload drone flight logs. Flight Review displays interactive 2D plots of flight data, such as IMU sensor data, the vehicle’s orientation, or battery level. It also allows a user to view and replay the flight in 3D. Together, the 2D plots and the 3D view provide insights into what the vehicle was doing and help with finding problems and improving the flight software and vehicle setup.

An animated drone model flying back and forth with its flight path colored yellow
An animated drone model flying back and forth with its flight path colored yellow

The 3D view makes use of Cesium, including 3D terrain data. An overlay visualizes a remote control that is synchronized to the timeline and shows the pilot’s commands. Having the maps and 3D terrain helps to put the flight trajectory into perspective. The 3D view is useful to analyze crashes and reconstruct what happened as it is possible to pause, seek in time, and change the replay speed. Check out an example log.

Beat Küng is the main author and maintainer of Flight Review, working for Auterion. Flight Review is open source. Contributions are welcome!