Area Editor
The Area Editor is a dedicated full-window map for laying out survey work before you turn it into a mission. Draw survey areas and corridors, refine their shapes, see a live flight briefing, and send the result straight to the Mission Planning planner as survey groups. It is aimed at mapping and survey flying, where the boundary is the hard part and the grid follows from it.
The Area Editor runs in its own window. You can open it from several places:
- Quick Launch in the top header (the tool launcher next to the connection status).
- The Area Editor card on the welcome screen, before you connect anything.
- The Survey dropdown on the mission map toolbar.
- The empty state of the Mission Library.
Because it is a separate window, you can keep it open on a second monitor next to the main app.
The tool rail down the left side holds the drawing and editing tools:
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Select | Move, rotate, and scale an object. Also exposes the buffer control for areas. |
| Polygon | Draw an area by clicking points; double-click to finish. |
| Corridor | Draw a centerline for a linear survey; double-click to finish. The swath width is set in the toolbar. |
| Branch | Select a corridor, then draw a fork off it; double-click to finish. |
| Rectangle | Drag a rectangle on the map. |
| Circle | Drag a circle from its center. |
| Edit | Move, add, and remove the points of the selected object. |
| Hole | Cut a no-fly hole into the selected area; double-click to finish. |
| Split | Slice an area into two with a line across it. |
| Measure | Read off distance and area without creating an object. |
An area is a closed region (polygon, rectangle, or circle) that a survey grid fills. A corridor is an open centerline that parallel strips follow, for roads, rail, power lines, and pipelines. A corridor carries a swath width in meters, set in the toolbar when the corridor tool or a corridor object is active.
- Holes carve keep-out regions inside an area. They travel with the area into the mission as no-fly cutouts.
- Split divides one area into two independent objects along a drawn line.
- Buffer (in the Select tool's options when an area is selected) grows or shrinks the selected boundary by a margin in meters, useful for adding a safety border around a parcel.
Undo and redo (Cmd/Ctrl+Z and Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Z) cover every edit. Delete or Backspace removes the selected object or measurement.
Every shape you draw appears in the Objects list on the right. Each entry has a visibility toggle, a color swatch, and a name. This is where a multi-area job stays organized: name each area, hide the ones you are not working on, and recolor them so they read clearly on the map.
A Layers control in the top right switches the base imagery between satellite, hybrid, street, terrain, and dark. The same data overlays as the main map are available here: aviation (OpenAIP airfields and airspace), zones (DIPUL UAS geo-zones for Germany), animated forecast wind, and live air traffic. Drawing over satellite imagery with airspace switched on lets you see the constraints while you lay out the boundary.
The search box at the top of the map gets you to the site quickly. It accepts two kinds of input:
-
Coordinates - paste a
lat, lonpair and the map flies straight there. - A place or address - type a name and matching results appear as you type. Pick one to fly to it.
The briefing panel runs the survey generator over your areas and corridors and reports the numbers that decide a flight:
- Covered area
- Flight distance and time
- Battery count
- Ground sample distance (GSD)
- Photo count
- Approximate captured-data size
It uses your active vehicle profile for the endurance and battery estimates. When several objects are on the map, switch the briefing between All (combined totals) and Selected (just the highlighted object).
The area readout has a unit toggle in the briefing header. Switch between hectares and acres, and distances follow into meters or feet. The choice is remembered across sessions.
-
Import a boundary from KML, KMZ, GeoJSON, or Shapefile (a bare
.shpor a zipped.shp+.prjbundle). Inner rings are kept as no-fly holes. - Export your areas back out to KML or KMZ.
This makes the Area Editor a round-trip surface for boundaries shared with other GIS tools.
When the layout is ready, Send to mission hands every area and corridor to the planner as survey groups, then brings the main window forward. The editor's own survey settings travel with the geometry, so the mission reproduces what the briefing showed: a corridor lands as a corridor with its parallel strips, and an area lands as the survey you set up, without re-deriving from unrelated planner settings.
From there it is the full Mission Planning workflow: tune the survey, split it into battery-sized sorties, check the altitude profile against terrain, and upload.