Use of drone simulation tools

This tool pack is to simulate a single drone to test controllers using Mavros.

Packages required

• PX4
• Arducopter not tested
• mavros for communicating with drones in ROS

Packages

• fake_vicon for producing vicon/qualisys information
• mocap_to_mavros for feeding vision pose information to drone
• drone_simulation_tools provides launch files to call fake_vicon and mocap_to_mavros

Use cases

1. PX4 in Gazebo + fake VICON + mavros + mocap_to_mavros

This is to simulate a drone with PX4 firmware in Gazebo and a VICON system that communicate with mavros.

In other words, it porvides a simulation envrionment for using VICON in reality: fake VICON takes drone information from Gazebo and publishs to ROS topics.

By the way, feeding vision pose information to drone with mocap_to_mavros is because PX4 only allow OFFBOARD when vision_pose is feeded.

    roslaunch drone_simulation_tools drone_px4_onboard.launch

Then, we should see

which show topics and nodes

• gazebo simulates a PX4 drone
• node vicon_fake from fake_vicon subscribe to gazebo and pushes drone pose info to /vicon/drone
• node mocap_to_mavros from mocap_to_mavros feeds drone pose infor to /mavros/vision_pose
• mavros builds communication between ROS and drone

2. PX4 in Gazebo + GPS + mavros

This is to simulate using GPS for localisation and mavros for communication. GPS information is set by default in Px4 Gazebo simulation.

So, in drone_px4_gps.launch, we simply start PX4 in Gazebo and mavros by

    roslaunch drone_simulation_tools drone_px4_gps.launch