Ardupilot

Installation Tutorial

http://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/setting-up-sitl-on-linux.html

Purpose

Ardupilot is used to simulate the hardware of a quadcopter.  

For those of you not familiar with quadcopters, each one needs a "Flight Control Board".  These simply perform the tasks necessary to keep the quadcopter level, and in the air.  Without them, the pilot would have to control each individual propeller rather than simply control the quadcopter's lateral, vertical and rotational movement (go up/down, left/right, rotate).

Ardupilot is able to create a virtual flight control board in order to allow simulations to behave like the physical version.  Truthfully, this is the only required program to run SITL, while Mavproxy and Dronekit-Python make it simpler to use.

Things to Note

*Ardupilot should be a GitHub repo that is downloaded to your computer.  This folder has subfolders for planes, rovers, quads, etc...  However, we primarily use the ArduCopter SITL option.

*The program to run SITL can be found in Tools/autotest/sim_vehicle.py

*Be sure to add the required path files to the .bashrc file as described in the installation tutorial.  This makes it infinitely easier to run SITL.

*Ardupilot and SITL simulates a quadcopter AND an environment.  Granted, this environment is limited to very basic parameters (location, wind speed, etc...).  It cannot simulate obstacles by itself (other than the ground I guess).