You can now install the FlightGear Flight Simulator and use it (in view-only mode) to display a 3D simulation of the vehicle and its surroundings.
This provides a much better visualization than 2D maps/HUD alone (as provided by MAVProxy and Mission Planner). In particular it is much easier to see movement that is hard to judge properly in 2D - like pitch and yaw.
SITL outputs FlightGear compatible state information on UDP port 5503. All you need to do is install FlightGear and start it using the batch files provided. When SITL starts, the FlightGear window will sync to your current location.
Currently this feature is only available on the master ardupilot branch. Setup instructions are available here: Windows and Linux (Ubuntu 14.04).
Kudos to Tridge (yet again!) for making this happen!
Comments
we probably could support X-Plane in SITL. For it to work really well we'd need X-Plane to support lock-step scheduling (where it pauses the physics model between input updates from ArduPilot). I don't know if X-Plane can do that or if the author would be willing to add support.
If anyone would like to work on that then let me know!
I Just tried it. It works awesome even on my very old laptop. Is is possible to support X-Plane in SITL? I use it for HIL and it would be great if it can work for SITL as well.
Thanks
follow-up
the following web links are down for me
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There is some documentation on the language available at:
http://www.plausible.org/nasal/
http://www.plausible.org/nasal/doc.html
http://www.plausible.org/nasal/sample.nas
@Tridge,
how long does it take to learn Nasal and to get METAR auto updated to match local geolocation and local weather report via environment settings in FlightGear ?
BTW, does Second Life support controlled drone flights in 3D environments ?
@Tridge That would be great. Good thing you have so much spare time on your hands :-)
btw, I should also say that the new gazebo stuff shown recently is a lot better than this, but is a lot harder to setup for now.
I'd really like to support a "just as a viewer" mode for Gazebo as well, like this does for FlightGear
cool, thx!
Thanks Hamish! I hope this makes SITL a bit more useful