Software-in-the-Loop Simulation of Cooperative Fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper develops a software-in-the-loop (SITL) simulation platform for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to test the cooperative control algorithms. The platform is based on ROS, Gazebo and PX4 SITL to realize the visualized simulation of multiple fixed-wing UAVs. The architecture consists of five layers including communication layer, simulator layer, flight control layer, coordination layer and human interaction layer. The control inputs and outputs are packaged as topics and services under the ROS communication network. To accomplish the cooperative control of fixed-wing UAVs, we design a two-loop control scheme, which consists of the PX4 inner-loop attitude controller, and the proposed outer-loop cooperative controller. A simulation is presented which incorporates the cooperative path-following control and leader-following control to achieve the cooperative behavior of four UAVs.