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ARGUS User Manual

AR overlay

The AR overlay projects map entities into the drone camera’s live video as floating markers with ground stalks and shadow ellipses. It’s a real 3D projection — not a 2D heads-up mask — using the drone’s full pose + camera frustum to compute screen positions.

What gets projected

Any world entity ARGUS knows about can render in the AR overlay:

  • Home point — the dock location or takeoff point.
  • Waypoints — the currently-active waypoint mission’s points.
  • Points of interest — operator-placed POI flags.
  • Assets — vehicles, radios, teams’ known positions.
  • Other drones — friendly aircraft positions with callsigns.
  • RTH polyline — if the drone is returning home, the path renders as a thick interpolated polyline (24 segments) from current position to home.

The projection math

For every entity:

  1. Convert WGS-84 lat/lng/alt → drone-relative ENU coordinates (east / north / up).
  2. Rotate into gimbal frame using drone attitude + gimbal pose.
  3. Project to camera space using horizontal + vertical FOV (DJI default 84° × 54°; configurable per drone model).
  4. Frustum-clip — drop entities behind the camera or beyond 5000 m.
  5. Draw in screen space.

What you see

Each entity renders as:

  • Ground stalk — a vertical line from the entity’s real altitude down to the terrain below (helps anchor 3D to ground).
  • Marker icon — scaled by distance so closer entities look bigger.
  • Shadow ellipse — small ellipse at the ground-level foot of the stalk for depth cueing.
  • Label — name + distance, placed near the marker.
  • RTH polyline — only for the returning-home aircraft, drawn as a thick multi-segment line.

Calibration requirements

Same pose needs as SVS:

  • Fresh drone GPS position.
  • Fresh gimbal pose.
  • Known aircraft FOV.

When any of these is stale the overlay auto-hides with a calibration chip.

Limits

  • Max render distance 5000 m. Beyond that, the projection tends to compress multiple entities into a pixel smear — we drop them.
  • Min render distance 2 m. Below that the entity is too close to render meaningfully.

What’s aspirational

  • Off-screen edge-director arrows — the architecture supports drawing small direction arrows on the screen edge for entities beyond the frustum. Current build only draws markers for in-frame entities. Planned.
  • Entity-filter UI — you get everything ARGUS knows about. Per-entity- type toggles (e.g. “only show waypoints, not other drones”) are planned.
  • Custom label templates — labels are hard-coded to “name + distance”. No user template.

Activating

Toggle AR in the drone-stream tile’s overlay stack. The overlay appears immediately.

Use cases

  • Wide search areas — see “what’s off to the right” without zooming out.
  • RTH visualisation — the thick polyline shows exactly where the drone will fly on the return.
  • Multi-drone awareness — friend drones appear in the frame when in view so you don’t fly into another aircraft.