Uploading fligh plan to off the shelf uav

Hello, I’m brand new to the uav world and am currently taking a class where the instructor wants us to use Mission Planner to develop a hypothetical flight plan for a hypothetical project. The other part of the class is creating models etc. in pix4d. I’m trying to take it a step further and use my own uav to collect imagery for the course. I’m confused as to if a flight plan generated with Mission Planner would have to be opened/uploaded into another app on the controller or if the uav would be connected directly to pc and the flight plan transferred? Can a flight plan generated with Mission Planner be transferred to an entry level off-the-shelf UAV such as Phantom 4 or Autel Robotics X-Star? I’m posting here as a last result after spending hours searching the Ardu site for an answer. I would greatly appreciate any help or guidance. Thanks, Sarah

Hi, welcome.

So. Different brands of drones may use different flight controllers, which means that Mission Planner may or may not be compatible. For example, DJI drones (and custom drones that use a DJI flight controller) use a proprietary DJI ground control software to plan missions. I’m not sure what Autel uses, but it looks like they use something called Starlink. Mission Planner will work with any drone that uses a flight controller running ArduPilot, such as the SkyViper V2450GPS or 3DR Solo.

That said, most GCSes are quite similar when it comes to planning missions - the skills you learn using Mission Planner will be easily transferable to whatever GCS that drone requires. They will each have their own unique features, but the concepts of waypoints, home locations, points of interest, etc. will all be present.

As for transferring the mission, Mission Planner uploads the mission directly to the drone, it doesn’t need to be imported into any other software first. This is also true with the other GCSes; they will be capable of both creating and uploading the missions.

Thanks you very much for clarifying, meant to respond earlier. I wasn’t sure if I was understanding mission planner’s setup correctly. I ended up getting a mavic pro and used pix4d capture for flight planning.