Tower GCS
An Android ground control station (GCS) for drones running ArduPilot. Fly and monitor multicopters, planes and rovers from an Android phone or tablet over MAVLink 1 or MAVLink 2.
Tower GCS is a maintained fork of the original DroidPlanner / Tower Android app (2016), rebuilt to install and run on Android 10 through Android 16.
⬇ Download the latest APK · Source on GitHub
Screenshots
| Flight screen | Mission editor | Parameters |
|---|---|---|
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What it does
- Live telemetry & flight control — attitude, position, battery, GPS, flight-mode switching, arm / disarm, takeoff, GUIDED “go here”.
- Mission planning — draw waypoint and survey missions on the map, upload to the vehicle, download, and run them. Clear the mission stored on the vehicle.
- Parameters — read and write the full ArduPilot parameter set.
- GUIDED follow-me — the phone streams its filtered position and velocity to the vehicle at 5 Hz.
- Reboot flight controller from the connected menu.
Connections
| Link | Notes |
|---|---|
| USB serial | SiK telemetry radio (433 / 915 MHz) on a USB-OTG cable |
| Wi-Fi | UDP or TCP to a Wi-Fi telemetry bridge or SITL |
| TCP / UDP | direct to any MAVLink endpoint |
MAVLink 2 is auto-negotiated; MAVLink 1 links keep working.
Tested
Flown against a MINI Pix running ArduCopter 4.7.0, MAVLink 1 and 2, over USB-serial SiK radio, Wi-Fi, TCP and UDP. Verified on phones from Android 10 to Android 16.
Follow-me (all sub-modes) and auto missions are validated end-to-end against SITL through the app, with the phone’s real GPS. Not yet flown on a vehicle: follow-me and the dronie.
Build it yourself
See the README. JDK 17, the Android SDK, and your own Google Maps API key.
Licence
GPLv3. A modified version of DroidPlanner/Tower — original work by Arthur Benemann, 3D Robotics and the Tower / DroidPlanner contributors; modernisation (2026) by Ramón José Moreno and Alejandro Moreno.