I am currently working on a Gazebo Sim standard VTOL, trying to look into disabling the fixed wing motor mid-flight. The idea behind this is to compare the total power consumption between a constant altitude flight, versus letting the drone glide to a certain altitude, and then re-enabling the motors to regain altitude as needed.
I am looking for advice on how I can most easily create this motor shutoff. I have tried setting the minimum thrust and speed values to zero and attempting to make a mission where these values are set to zero. However, this approach never seemed to work, and any mission configurations I tried did not give the shutdown I was looking for.
I am currently building a simple uORB topic with a boolean parameter, which is set by a MAVLink command to control this interaction. This uORB topic would then control the vehicle thrust setpoint to 0 or its regular value. While this approach works conceptually, it feels somewhat more complex than necessary and might cause more issues down the line.