KML files for mission plans in QGC

[zhrandell (Zachary Randell)]

Hello all,

I have what I hope is a relatively simple QGC question (we’re running v4.2.8 on a Windows PC).

I’m trying to upload KML files to QGC as to provide a simple trackline in QGC’s map. However, I’m not wanting to upload any sort of polygon, circular fence, or any more sophisticated type of mission profile. I’m simply trying to upload a KML file that contains a set of latitude/longitude coordinates that will populate and display in the map in QGC (see, e.g., the .csv file attached here . . . I wasn’t able to upload .kml to this post).

Note that we will NOT “formally fly” the mission plan autonomously – that’s a complex subject with ROVs that we’re interested in, but that’s not my purpose here. We simply want to be able to see the GPS coordinates in QGC’s map, and then we can fly the ROV manually along those track lines (and we have an acoustic GPS and Doppler Velocity Log that will enable the necessary manual navigation/piloting).

I tried to upload a KML file into QGC as suggested here, though as visable in the attached screenshot, QGC isn’t happy, with the following error: KML file load failed. Unable to find Polygon node in KML. Upon searching this error message, I can see in the code what generated the message (linked here), but I don’t really understand it.

Can anyone provide some insight here? Is there some way I can load a set of latitude/longitude coordinates into QGC via a KML or other type of file format without those coordinates forming explicit polygons? Or can I spoof QGC and trick it into thinking my coordinates are from a single “line” polygon?

Finally, to give you a sense of the types of coordinates we’re wanting to load (in addition to the attached .csv file), see the map attached below - that’s from x3 of our ROV survey sites, with each site consisting of x4 ROV “transects,” or individual surveys. In essence, we want to load these previous transects into QGC so that we can re-survey these locations with as much spatial fidelity as possible.

Thank you very much in advance for any insight you all can provide!

Zach

example_csv_ROV_coordinates.csv (2.3 KB)

[zhrandell (Zachary Randell)]

Hello all,

I wanted to close out this post with a solution, in case anyone else runs into this problem. It doesn’t seem that KML files will support what we want to do in terms of mission plans. However, we were able to use the Mission Plain-Text File Format to achieve our desired results (see here).

In case anyone else is interested in converting a .csv file with lat/lon coordinates to a .txt file that will enable a mission plan in QGC, you can find a Python script linked here to do so (see the maps pasted here). The input and output data for the maps are also attached here.

Big shoutout to @clyde for identifying this solution, and for writing the Python script!

Zach

example_csv_ROV_coordinates.csv (2.3 KB)
data_output.txt (4.4 KB)