RflySim: A Rapid Multicopter Development Platform for Education and Research Based on Pixhawk and MATLAB

In this paper, we propose and open a rapid development platform– –RflySim based on Pixhawk/PX4 and MATLAB/Simulink for UAV education and research. This platform adopts model-based development ideas and uses software-in-the-loop simulation and hardware-in-the-loop simulation to accelerate physical deployment. With that, beginners and developers can directly use MATLAB/Simulink to design low-level controllers (such as attitude control, position control) and high-level applications (such as decision-making, autonomous flight), and then deploy them into a multicopter autopilot system with no need to access the C/C++ underlying code. Three demonstrations are presented to verify the ease of use and the high efficiency of the proposed platform.