Developement of SITL & HITL System based on PX4-Matlab for VTOL Test

Donghyeon Ko, Minkyu Kim, Jinseok Jung, SungTae Moon

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2024.51.6.528

PX4, the open-source-based flight control computer, is garnering significant attention for its ability to support various drone configurations. The integration of Gazebo and PX4 enables the validation of flight control algorithms in simulations, making it widely utilized in system development. However, when developing specialized drone configurations not natively supported by Gazebo, it becomes challenging to create vehicle models. In addition the fidelity of the drone component models provided by Gazebo is often not high, leading to discrepancies between simulation and actual aircraft operation results. In the aerospace field, Matlab/Simulink, known for its high-fidelity drone models, has been widely used. However, the integration of Matlab/Simulink with PX4 has presented challenges, resulting in the need to maintain separate source code for simulation and real-world operations, leading to duplicated development efforts. This paper proposes a PX4-Matlab simulator, which leverages Matlab/Simulink commonly used in the drone industry, as an alternative to the conventional approach of using PX4 and Gazebo. To verify the proposed system, it was applied and tested on the LC-62 VTOL drone.