Gazebo - ROS - Simulink Framework for Hover Control and Trajectory Tracking of Crazyflie 2.0

Autonomous aerial vehicles are gaining much prominence in applications where the area under surveillance is huge. There has been an extensive research accomplished in the area of developing and implementing control algorithms for quadrotors. But the testing and validation of the developed control algorithms on a physical quadrotor is rather difficult which arises the need for a simulation platform. This work presents a Simulation framework for the position control and trajectory tracking of the Gazebo model of the Crazyflie 2.0 quadcopter. The control algorithm which runs in the MATLAB & Simulink (R) environment controls the position of the quadcopter in the Gazebo simulator, through Robot Operating System (ROS) interfaces. The novelty here is to establish the connection between the ROS enabled Gazebo quadcopter model and the Simulink environment and thereby sending and receiving the control commands between both the environments to achieve the required control. A simple PID controller is used to attain the hovering control and trajectory tracking for the Crazyflie 2.0 quadcopter. Though the framework has been used to test the control algorithm for a Crazyflie 2.0 quadcopter, the approach followed can be applied for developing and testing the control algorithms with any ROS enabled quadrotor.