Bitcraze Forums

Has anyone thought about making a simulator for Crazyflie? Seems like it could be useful for practicing manual control without causing too much damage, and for writing software to control the copter.

Looks like there are two simulators (Flightgear and CRRCSim) that are open source and cross platform, and might be able to be hooked up to the Crazyflie pc client:

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1771800
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/crrcsim/
http://www.flightgear.org/about/features/

Does this make any sense? Or would it never be close enough to the real performance characteristics to be useful.

It is something we have been thinking about for a while but never had time to look into it. having a simulation model of the Crazyflie is something I would love to see happening!

If it is realistic enough it would definitely help training to fly the crazyflie. The hardest currently is to control the thrust to find the hovering point, I guess this can be well simulated.

A simulator would also permit to do hardware in the loop which could help a lot the development of new regulation algorithm.

I guess it could never be perfect but it would definitely help. One challenge might be that Crazyflie is very small and thus very fast to move so the simulation model might have to run faster than for a 'normal' plane (I guess this is something that has been solves already....).