Simulator Architecture¶
Architecture of the SIL Simulation¶
TODO
This page is still under construction. Check back soon!
Todo
Make a figure of the new architecture. Maybe make it be a GIF? We could replace the table below
To best mimic the hardware experience of ROSflight, the SIL plugin for Gazebo actually implements the firmware source code as a library.
We just implemented a different "board layer" which uses gazebo instead of hardware calls for things like imu_read() and pwm_write().
Instead of a serial link over USB to the flight controller, we use a UDP connection bouncing off of localhost to communicate between rosflight_io and the firmware.
This means the interface to the SIL plugin is identical to that of hardware.
The rosflight_io node is the main gateway to the firmware in simulation, just as it is in hardware.
The following table summarizes the correlation between connections in hardware and simulation:
| Connection Type | Hardware | Simulation |
|---|---|---|
Serial communications to rosflight_io |
USB / UART | UDP |
| RC | PPM Receiver | ROS2 RC topic (rosflight_msgs/RCRaw) |
| Motors | PWM | Gazebo Plugin |
| Sensors | SPI/I2C | Gazebo Plugin |