Hello,
So I have been studying how you can simulate a quadcopter with gazebo and sitl, and now I want to make my own model of the drone I am making for college.
I have a CAD with the drone complete already, so what are the next steps or the best steps? Do I need to use blender?
It’s usually easier to modify an existing model than start from scratch, at least to start with. The ardupilot_gazebo package contains an example model iris_with_ardupilot and the Gazebo tutorials has a category on how to build a robot.
To get the robot working the important features are the model dimensions and mass distribution. You don’t need the CAD model for this and the model structure should be built out of primitives (boxes, cylinders and spheres). Once you have the kinematics and the inertia correct you can then dress the model up with the visuals from your CAD model. You’ll need to export the parts as STL mesh files and may need to tinker about with them in Blender to alter the origin as this can help when aligning them with the Gazebo model geometry.
I am also in a similar situation, can you give a bit more elaborate guide, or some more resources how to proceed, the how to build a robot link is not working and i am also not able to figure it out how to proceed, while doing this i have stumbled upon matlab also, please tell me what is the best way to do a simple flight dynamics simulation, or just to check that at how much throttle my drone is flying and how it it C.G balance while flying with a certain payload underneath
Have you advanced in this topic? I’m also looking for the similar guide
GitHub - utiasSTARS/PhoenixDrone-sitl_gazebo: Gazebo Plugins for SITL Simulation with Phoenix Drone this looks rather complete and modelling a tail sitter it might be one of the more challenging examples.
@blaggacao, I’m afraid that repo is for a version of Gazebo that is now EOL and no longer supported in ArduPilot.
There are a number of example models in SITL_Models/Gazebo/docs at master · ArduPilot/SITL_Models · GitHub that do work with the current version of Gazebo and ArduPilot. They include planes, quadplanes, tailsitters, bi-copters, rovers and boats, and some novel frames such as the weight shifted aircraft.