Comprehensive Simulation of Quadrotor UAVs Using ROS and Gazebo

Quadrotor UAVs have successfully been used both in research and for commercial applications in recent years and there has been significant progress in the design of robust control software and hardware. Nevertheless, testing of prototype UAV systems still means risk of damage due to failures. Motivated by this, a system for the comprehensive simulation of quadrotor UAVs is presented in this paper. Unlike existing solutions, the presented system is integrated with ROS and the Gazebo simulator. This comprehensive approach allows simultaneous simulation of diverse aspects such as flight dynamics, onboard sensors like IMUs, external imaging sensors and complex environments. The dynamics model of the quadrotor has been parameterized using wind tunnel tests and validated by a comparison of simulated and real flight data. The applicability for simulation of complex UAV systems is demonstrated using LIDAR-based and visual SLAM approaches available as open source software.