Flight Controllers

A flight controller provides automatic control of the vehicle. The amount of automatic control can vary from fully autonomous flight to assisted manual flight.

Project AirSim supports the following flight controllers: Simple Flight, PX4 Autopilot, ArduPilot, and Manual Controller.

Simple Flight

Simple Flight is a lightweight flight controller that comes with Project AirSim and enables you to setup and start flying quickly and easily. Simple Flight currently supports quadrotor, hexarotor, VTOL quad-x tailsitter, and VTOL quad tiltrotor airframes.

PX4 Autopilot

PX4 Autopilot is a popular open-source flight controller. Project AirSim using PX4 currently supports the quadrotor airframe in the Hardware-In-The-Loop (HITL) configuration, and quadrotor, hexarotor, VTOL quad-x tailsitter, and VTOL quad tiltrotor airframes in the Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) configuration.

If you are not familiar with setting up PX4, you may find it easier to start with Simple Flight if your airframe is supported.

ArduPilot

ArduPilot is an open-source flight controller supported through a UDP/IP Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) connection. Project AirSim includes ready-to-run quadrotor and hexarotor examples. Its Client API flight commands are not supported; control the vehicle through ArduPilot or a ground control station such as Mission Planner or QGroundControl.

Manual Controller

Manual Controller is a pass-through controller type with control signal outputs that are set completely manually by API and optionally starts with initial values set by config. See Manual Controller settings and Manual Controller commands for more details.

JSBSim

JSBSim is a flight dynamics model (FDM) that can be used to simulate how an aircraft moves and responds to control inputs. A flight controller is the system that decides which control inputs to send, such as throttle, elevator, aileron, rudder, or rotor commands.

Comparing controllers

The following chart compares the flight controllers when used with Project AirSim:

Feature	Simple Flight	PX4	ArduPilot	Manual Controller	JSBSim
Project AirSim Airframes	Quadrotor, hexarotor, VTOL quad-x tailsitter, VTOL quad tiltrotor	Quadrotor, hexarotor, VTOL quad-x tailsitter, VTOL quad tiltrotor in SITL, quadrotor only in HITL	Quadrotor, hexarotor in SITL	Any	Any
Controller Hardware	None	None for SITL, required for HITL	None for SITL	None	None
Setup	Easy	Harder	Harder	Easy	Easy
Use	Easy	Harder	Harder	Manual	Easy
Tuning Support	No	Yes	Yes	N/A	No