Gazebo for MAVLink SITL and HITL

This is a flight simulator for multirotors, VTOL and fixed wing. It uses the motor model and other pieces from the RotorS simulator, but in contrast to RotorS has no dependency on ROS. This repository is in the process of being re-integrated into RotorS, which then will support ROS and MAVLink as transport options: https://github.com/ethz-asl/rotors_simulator.

If you use this simulator in academic work, please cite RotorS as per the README in the above link.

Installation (Gazebo 9)

Follow instructions on the official site to install Gazebo.

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install gazebo9 libgazebo9-dev

Mac OS

brew tap osrf/simulation
brew install gazebo9

Arch Linux

sudo packer -S gazebo
# or
yaourt -S gazebo

sitl_gazebo plugin dependencies

Some plugins on this packages require some specific dependencies:

• Protobuf is required to generate custom protobuf messages to be published and subscribed between topics of different plugins;
• Jinja 2 is used to generate some SDF models from templates;
• Gstreamer is required for a plugin that streams video from a simulated camera.

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install libprotobuf-dev libprotoc-dev protobuf-compiler libeigen3-dev libxml2-utils python-rospkg python-jinja2

Gstreamer:

sudo apt-get install $(apt-cache --names-only search ^gstreamer1.0-* | awk '{ print $1 }' | grep -v gstreamer1.0-hybris) -y

Mac OS

pip install rospkg jinja2
brew tap homebrew/versions
brew install eigen graphviz libxml2 sdformat3 opencv glib
brew install homebrew/versions/protobuf260

Gstreamer:

brew install gstreamer gst-plugins-base gst-plugins-good

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S --noconfirm --needed eigen3 hdf5 opencv protobuf vtk yay python2-jinja

Gstreamer:

sudo pacman -S --needed $(pacman -Ssq gstreamer)

Build sitl_gazebo

Clone the repository to your computer.

IMPORTANT: If you do not clone to ~/src/sitl_gazebo, all remaining paths in these instructions will need to be adjusted.

mkdir -p ~/src
cd src
git clone --recursive https://github.com/PX4/sitl_gazebo.git

Create a build folder in the top level of your repository:

mkdir build

Navigate into the build directory and invoke CMake from it:

cd ~/src/sitl_gazebo
cd build
cmake ..

Now build the gazebo plugins by typing:

make -j$(nproc) -l$(nproc)

Next add the location of this build directory to your gazebo plugin path, e.g. add the following line to your .bashrc (Linux) or .bash_profile (Mac) file:

# Set the plugin path so Gazebo finds our model and sim
export GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH=${GAZEBO_PLUGIN_PATH}:$HOME/src/sitl_gazebo/build
# Set the model path so Gazebo finds the airframes
export GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=${GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH}:$HOME/src/sitl_gazebo/models
# Disable online model lookup since this is quite experimental and unstable
export GAZEBO_MODEL_DATABASE_URI=""

You also need to add the the root location of this repository, e.g. add the following line to your .bashrc (Linux) or .bash_profile (Mac) file:

# Set path to sitl_gazebo repository
export SITL_GAZEBO_PATH=$HOME/src/sitl_gazebo

Geotagging Plugin

If you want to use the geotagging plugin, make sure you have exiftool installed on your system. On Ubuntu it can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

Install

If you wish the libraries and models to be usable anywhere on your system without specifying th paths, install as shown below.

Note: If you are using Ubuntu, it is best to see the packaging section.

sudo make install

Testing

Gazebo will now launch when typing 'gazebo' on the shell:

. /usr/share/gazebo/setup.sh
. /usr/share/mavlink_sitl_gazebo/setup.sh
gazebo worlds/iris.world

Please refer to the documentation of the particular flight stack how to run it against this framework, e.g. PX4

Unit Tests

For building and running test an installation of 'googletest' is needed.

On Ubuntu it can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install libgtest-dev
cd /usr/src/googletest
sudo cmake . && cd googletest
sudo make -j$(nproc) -l$(nproc)
sudo cp *.a /usr/lib

On macOS it needs to be installed from source:

git clone https://github.com/google/googletest
pushd googletest
mkdir build
pushd build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc) -l$(nproc)
make install

When writing test it’s important to be careful which API functions of Gazebo are called. As no Gazebo server is running during the tests some functions can produce undefined behaviour (e.g. segfaults).

catkin tools

With catkin, the unit tests are enabled by default.

# After setting up the catkin workspace
catkin build -j4 -l4 -DBUILD_ROS_INTERFACE=ON
cd build/mavlink_sitl_gazebo/
catkin run_tests

Plain CMake

For building the tests with plain CMake, the flag ENABLE_UNIT_TESTS needs to be provided.

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DENABLE_UNIT_TESTS=On ..

Then build and run the tests:

make -j$(nproc) -l$(nproc)
make test

Packaging

Debian packages

To create a debian package for Ubuntu and install it to your system.

cd Build
cmake ..
make
rm *.deb
cpack -G DEB
sudo dpkg -i *.deb