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Adding Waypoints and Geofences

The GCS has two click-to-place panels in Foxglove:

  • Waypoint Editor — drop ordered 3D waypoints for the Navigate task.
  • Polygon Editor — drop vertices of a 2D area to use as a geofence / search bounds for the Exploration and Coverage tasks.

Both panels work the same way: enable click capture then click in the 3D panel to place points.

Robot Tasks panel — Navigate tab with the embedded Waypoint Editor

The two editors live inside the Robot Tasks panel — the Waypoint Editor appears under the Navigate tab, and the Polygon Editor appears under the Exploration and Coverage tabs (where it feeds the search_bounds field).

End-to-end demo: enabling click capture, dropping points, saving the set, then sending it to a robot.

Place points

  1. In the editor panel, toggle Enable click capture on.
  2. (Optional) In the top right of the 3D panel, switch the camera to a top-down view to make it easier to drop points on the ground plane.

  3. In the 3D panel toolbar, click the Publish tool (top right, ▷ icon) and switch its mode to Publish 2D point (/clicked_point) — this is what sends clicks to the editor.

    3D-mode toggle and the Publish 2D point option in the Foxglove 3D panel toolbar

  4. Click anywhere in the 3D panel. A red marker appears at the click location. The waypoint editor draws spheres in click order; the polygon editor draws a closed loop.

  5. The Default altitude field controls the z coordinate that gets attached to each click — set it once, then click freely on the ground.

To add a point without clicking — e.g. for a precise coordinate — type values into the + Add row and press Enter.

Reorder, edit, delete or duplicate

  • Reorder — drag a row up or down in the active list. The marker numbering updates immediately.
  • Edit a point — click the row, edit the x / y / z fields, press Enter.
  • Delete a point — click the ✕ on the row.
  • Clear all — click Clear. Doesn't touch saved sets.
  • Duplicate — click the ⧉ icon on a row to insert a copy of that point directly after it. Useful for laying down repeated patterns like a survey grid where each new point is a small offset from the previous one.

For polygons specifically, vertex order defines the perimeter — reorder rows to flip the polygon shape.

Save and load

Saves let you name a set of points and bring them back later — the Robot Tasks panel reads the same saves, so a saved waypoint set can be selected as a Navigate target and a saved polygon can be selected as search_bounds for Exploration / Coverage.

Two-step save flow:

  1. Type a name into the save name… field, then click + Add. The save now exists in memory and shows up in the saves list.
  2. Click Save on that row to persist it to disk. The button changes to ✓ Saved when the file write succeeds.

Other actions per saved row:

  • Load — replaces the active list with the saved one. Useful for re-editing a previously persisted set.
  • Delete — removes the save from both memory and disk.

Saves are written to host-mounted JSON files inside the GCS container:

Editor File
Waypoints ~/.airstack/gcs_waypoint_saves.json
Polygons ~/.airstack/gcs_polygon_saves.json

These survive container restarts and can be hand-edited or version-controlled if you want to ship a curated mission set.

Use them in a task

  • Navigate — in the Robot Tasks panel, select the Navigate tab, pick a saved waypoint set from the from: dropdown (or active to use whatever's currently in the editor), pick a robot, click Send. The Grab button copies the current selection into the JSON waypoints field below.
  • Exploration / Coverage — same flow, but the polygon save fills the search_bounds field.

Robot Tasks panel — Exploration tab with search_bounds populated from the Polygon Editor

If a save doesn't appear in the dropdown after creating it, click the dropdown again to refresh — the Tasks panel re-reads the latched saves topic on focus.

Troubleshooting

Symptom Likely cause
Clicks don't register Click capture isn't enabled, or the Publish tool isn't set to Click position
Clicks register but no marker shows The 3D panel doesn't have the editor's marker topic enabled — open its Topics list and toggle on /gcs/waypoints/markers (or /gcs/polygon/markers)
Saves don't persist Host volume ~/.airstack not mounted on the GCS container
Save name silently overwrites Both + Add and Save overwrite by name — pick a unique name
Tasks panel doesn't see a new save Re-open the dropdown to refresh, or restart the panel

See also