PX4 Community Q&A: May 03, 2023==

Coordination Calls PX4 Autopilot
3

Hi @princealy , I’ll not be able to attend tomorrow, so here is the answer for your questions.
You can simulate multiple drones with PX4 and apply offboard control on them. Everything is in the docs and it refers to the current main branch:

  1. Multiple drone simulations: I am most familiar with Gazebo Classic (default gazebo version up to Ubuntu 20.04) and Gazebo Garden (default Gazebo version from Ubuntu 22.04). In both cases you can spawn multiple drone in different location and have them connected to a PX4 instance.

  2. Offboard control: Once you have the simulation running you can either use offboard through mavlink (mavsdk, mavros, the one that you prefer) or you can use the new PX4 - ROS 2 bridge and its support for multi-vehicle simulations and have all the UORB topics that you want available as ROS 2 topics. Then you can implement any swarm logic on your companion computer / offboard computer.

To be clear, PX4 does not implement any swarm control algorithm. However you can send offboard commands and implements your controllers offboard.

Does this suit your needs? Feel free to open a specific topic if you have other specific needs.

Other relevant resources:

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