Parts of the AirLib stack can be used on a real drone. For example, you can run the MavlinkCom library and MavLinkTest app to test the connection
between your big brain and little brain. For our testing we mounted a Gigabyte Brix BXi7-5500 ultra compact PC on the drone connected to the Pixhawk flight controller over USB. The Gigabyte PC is running Ubuntu, so we are able to SSH into it over Wifi:
Once connected you can run MavLinkTest with this command line:
MavLinkTest -serial:/dev/ttyACM0,115200 -logdir:.
And this will produce a log file of the flight which can then be used for playback in the simulator.
You can also add -proxy:192.168.1.100:14550 to connect MavLinkTest to a remote computer where you can run QGroundControl or our
PX4 Log Viewer which is another handy way to see what is going on with your drone.
MavLinkTest then has some simple commands for testing your drone, here's a simple example of some commands:
arm
takeoff 5
orbit 10 2
This will arm the drone, takeoff ot 5 meters, then do an orbit pattern radius 10 meters, at 2 m/s. Type '?' to find all available commands.
When you land the drone you can stop MavLinkTest and copy the *.mavlink log file that was generated.
Once you are happy that the MavLinkTest is working, you can also run DroneServer and DroneShell as follows. First run MavLinkTest with a local proxy to send everything to DroneServer:
MavLinkTest -serial:/dev/ttyACM0,115200 -logdir:. -proxy:127.0.0.1:14560
Change ~/Documents/AirSim/settings.json to say "serial":false, because we want DroneServer to look for this UDP connection.
DroneServer 0
Lastly, you can now connect DroneShell to this instance of DroneServer and use the DroneShell commands to fly your drone:
DroneShell
==||=>
Welcome to DroneShell 1.0.
Type ? for help.
Microsoft Research (c) 2016.
Waiting for drone to report a valid GPS location...
==||=> arm
==||=> takeoff
==||=> circlebypath -radius 10 -velocity 2