UgCS for Academic Research

Academic pricing is available to universities, research institutes, and degree-enrolled students. Licenses can cover an individual researcher, a full lab deployment, or teaching seats for a class. You confirm eligibility with a faculty email, student ID, or institution letterhead.

Yes, degree-enrolled students qualify for academic pricing on their own. The same academic terms also cover individual researchers, lab-wide deployments, and teaching seats, so anything from a single thesis project to a whole methods class can be licensed. Proof of enrollment, such as a student ID, is all that's needed.

Yes, UgCS Open is a free version you can download and use to evaluate the software. It runs the same desktop planning workflow of UgCS Expert with usage limits of two missions per day and a 250 meter cap on the distance between the two furthest points of a route, which is enough to judge fit before moving to a paid academic license. The free UgCS Basics Course is also a good way to see the workflow end to end.

Almost certainly. UgCS works with DJI, NDAA-compliant Blue UAS, and open platforms including ArduPilot and PX4, and you can add a custom profile for Pixhawk-based aircraft. Through custom sensor profiles it supports multispectral, hyperspectral, LiDAR, GPR, magnetometer, and methane payloads, so you can keep your existing hardware.

UgCS gives you control that built-in apps generally don't: terrain following from your own DEM, DTM, or DSM data, missions that save every parameter for exact re-flights, custom sensor profiles, and support for drones beyond a single manufacturer. For research that depends on a consistent ground sampling distance and identical repeat flights, that control is what separates comparable data from noise. It also runs on the desktop, where a full screen makes complex missions far easier to plan than a small controller does.

Yes. UgCS is desktop software that installs locally and runs fully offline, with no cloud login required to operate. Cache your maps and elevation data beforehand, and you can plan or adjust missions in remote terrain with no connectivity.

Yes, and that is one of the main reasons researchers choose it. Every mission parameter saves, so you can re-fly the exact same route months or years later. When the flight path is identical across seasons, the changes you measure reflect the biology or the terrain, not variation in how the drone flew.

Yes, in peer-reviewed studies across more than 300 universities. Recent examples include Dalhousie University, published in the ISPRS Open Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing in November 2025, the University of Nevada in Endangered Species Research volume 59, and the University of Arizona by Aguilar, Holt et al. in 2026. It has also been used at UC San Diego, the University of Patras, the University of Alaska Anchorage, and the Geological Survey of Norway, among others.

UgCS is desktop software that installs on Windows, macOS, and Linux (Ubuntu), and all planning is done on the computer. A license activates on one computer by default, and you can buy additional activations if a researcher works across machines. For larger groups, lab-wide deployments and teaching seats handle multiple users.

Academic users get the free UgCS Basics Course to assign to students before fieldwork, research-focused webinars, full technical documentation useful for methods sections, and direct email support with priority during active fieldwork. First-year support and software updates are included on perpetual licenses.