What Is UAV Toolbox?

Katie Brenner, MathWorks

UAV Toolbox provides tools and reference applications for designing, simulating, testing, and deploying unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and drone applications. You can design autonomous flight algorithms, UAV missions, and flight controllers. The Flight Log Analyzer app lets you interactively analyze 3D flight paths, telemetry information, and sensor readings from common flight log formats.

For desktop simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing of autonomous flight algorithms and flight controllers, you can generate and simulate UAV scenarios. You can also simulate camera, lidar, IMU, and GPS sensor outputs in a photorealistic 3D environment or in a 2.5D simulation environment.

UAV Toolbox provides reference application examples for common UAV usages, such as autonomous drone package delivery with multirotor UAV. The toolbox supports C/C++ code generation for rapid prototyping, HIL testing, and standalone deployment to hardware such as the Pixhawk® Autopilot (with Embedded Coder^®).

UAV Toolbox provides algorithms, simulation environments, flight log analysis tools, and reference applications to design, simulate, test, and deploy unmanned aerial vehicle and drone applications. You can start your UAV algorithm development using UAV guidance models with path-planning algorithms, such as waypoint following, orbit following, and path manager to plan your missions.

You can use the cuboid UAV simulation environment to quickly construct and simulate UAV scenarios to generate test cases and sensor data using the models you build with existing GPS, INS, and LiDAR sensor models. For a more photo-realistic simulation, use the 3D simulation environment to simulate your UAV application while synthesizing high fidelity camera and LiDAR sensor readings.

After you finish testing your algorithms in simulation, deploy to hardware using the PX4 support package and embedded coder to build and deploy autopilot code to PX4-based autopilots. UAV Toolbox also supports MAVLink communication protocol to connect and exchange messages with compatible software and hardware.

Finally, you can use the flight log analyzer app to import flight test and simulation log files to analyze, visualize, and playback flight telemetry data. Reference applications and examples are provided in UAV Toolbox to help you jumpstart your UAV development.

Examples such as UAV package delivery demo take you through the incremental design process of implementing a small multi-copter simulation. For more information, please visit the UAV Toolbox product page and download a trial to check out the reference examples.