In some cases, it is very useful to have the latest (or last) known coordinates transferred to a smartphone.
The usable cases are:
- Lost drone recovery
- Recovery of a target where the drone is hovering above
Why it is required
Imagine the following situation. You have the drone in flight and abruptly crashed in a cornfield. The datalink is probably lost, although the drone is in relatively good condition. At this moment you should know the last known geographical coordinates to found the precise landing spot in the cornfield. Something which is almost impossible without the coordinates transferred by telemetry.
But current implementation of QGC does not have a standard method to display the geographic coordinates in the machine-readable form. Therefore the only solution how to found the drone is manually transcribing the coordinates to the smartphone and go in the cornfield to found the place.
Unfortunately, there is a huge space to make a fatal mistake which leads to completely lost of the position information and as a result, complete loss of that drone. (The logging in QGC could be turned off, the QGC could be accidentally exited, the coordinates could not be transcribed correctly, etc.)
Possible implementation
One of the possible implementations of transferring the coordinates to a smartphone is the use of QR-codes. In that case, the actual or last UAV position could be displayed in QRcode upon requesting it by the user. The request could be performed preferably by clicking on the arrow on the map. Alternatively, the QRcode generation could be requested by an option in the mavlink-inspector.