Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) with Cube Orange+ and FlightGear

General
1

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to set up a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation using a Cube Orange+ flight controller with FlightGear.

I found the old ArduPilot documentation describing FlightGear HIL:
https://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/flightgear-hardware-in-the-loop-simulation.html

However, it appears that this documentation was written for the older APM/Pixhawk workflow, and I understand that HIL support may no longer be actively maintained.

My goal is to use the actual Cube Orange+ hardware as the flight controller while FlightGear provides the aircraft simulation and visualization.

I would like to know:

  • Has anyone successfully implemented FlightGear HIL with a Cube Orange+ recently?

  • Is the old FlightGear HIL workflow still compatible with current ArduPilot firmware?

  • If not, what is the recommended approach for running HIL with Cube Orange+?

  • Would a custom MAVLink/pymavlink bridge be the preferred solution, or is there another supported method?

Any guidance, examples, or references would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

2

No, we dropped HTL support a long time ago. You can use SIH (Simulation in hardware) or SITL.

SIH uses a very basic flight model as it runs physics simulation on the FC.

3

If you need HIL you might want to explore this path (although it is a bit pricey): https://www.mathworks.com/help/uav/get-started-ardupilot1.html Although PX4 is supported for a longer time and true HILS examples are already available: https://www.mathworks.com/help/uav/px4/ref/PX4-HITL-with-VTOL-UAV-in-simulink.html