SITL Simulation Performance

ArduPlane Plane Simulation
1

Hi,
First of all,I want to thank you to everyone who contributed to the peoject.
We have develepod VTOL UAV. We want to test our system in simulation environment before first flight. We also want to use Cube orange as a Autopilot. We have a matlab model of our VTOL UAV(we have already calculated aerodynamic constants and created dynamic model of the UAV) .

I saw Ardupilot MATLAB SITL demo on youtube. I think it is a good example for persons like me who want to make simulation with matlab and ardupilot. I have doubts about ardupilot’s(SIL) controller performances. I assume that our mathematical model of our system is nearly close as real mathematical model of our UAV system, what do you think about the performance of the ardupilot’s(SIL) controllers? How close are SIL controller performances to those of controllers that is running on real hardware?

Thanks for your answers.

2

To do a simulation you need both an accurate model of the ArduCopter control loop and an accurate model of the copter dynamic model.

SITL is a near perfect control loop simulator, but it is a inaccurate copter dynamic model of YOUR specific copter.

So … you can change SITL to model your specific dynamic model, and you get want you want.

3

Hi Amilcarlucas,

Thank you for your information that you wrote. I understand that you wrote is that I can make a simulation with ardupilot SITL firmware without any question about control loop. Only dynamic model is a problem. If i can make dynamic model very accurate, simulation works well. Because SITL has a near perfect control loop performance(almost Real time) even if runs on a PC.

Thanks again.

4

Yeap, you understood it correctly