HITL simulation with PX4 for a custom VTOL

Hi,

I recently found out about the UAV toolbox and I'm excited to learn more!

I designed and built a custom VTOL tailsitter drone that can fly in both fixed-wing and hover mode. I am interested in using the toolbox to develop my own controller (to control actuators to achieve controlled flight), generate PX4 firmware with custom controller, and run HITL simulation to make sure I can do a mission successfully.

Going through the documentation, I can see bits and pieces of want to do. So my questions are:

1. Can I do a VTOL tailsitter with this toolbox (design controller, PX4 firmware generation, HITL)? How?
2. Can I do a UAV with more than four rotors?
3. Can you please point a confused newbie to the right direction and places in documentation to help accomplish my goals?

Thanks!

[Vedant]

Mathworks published new VTOL examples here : https://www.mathworks.com/help/uav/ug/design-and-tune-controller-for-vtol-uav.html

Answer 1

[Manoj Velmurugan]

You can try using our examples on fixed-wing and quadcopter to get started with VTOL plant modeling and control. We do not have a reference example for VTOL specifically.

• HITL reference example with plant and controller models for fixed-wing.
• HITL reference example with plant and controller models for quadcopter.

You can control more than 4 rotors using the 'PX4 PWM Output' block.

[Bilal Maassarani]

So would it be possible to switch between the controllers in HITL simulation and in the code generated for PX4 (to reflect switch/transition between flight modes)? I will probably need to do controllers for the transition also I guess..

[Manoj Velmurugan]

You can use enabled subsystems to disable certain control loops (and enable others) during different flight modes. Refer to our fixed-wing reference controllers for more info.