An architecture for testing autonomous flight and sensors

Question

I'm designing a simple autopilot software on top of Ardupilot, my goal is to possibly interface an Raspi on top of ArduPilot Mega (APM). I am stuck on setting up a simulation environment using either V-Rep or Gazebo. The quadcopter will have basic sensors plus advanced sensors. basic sensors talks directly with ArduPilot, while advanced sensors talks with my own autopilot software. I am trying to wrap my head around a feasible setup to test the software while using ArduPilot Mega in the Hardware-In-The-Loop. I am planning on having three stages of Simulation:

Stage 1. Simulate quadcopter physics in Gazebo/V-Rep, run ArduPilot software and my autopilot software in a VM (not sure if it's even do-able)

Stage 2. Simulate quadcopter physics in computer, run my autopilot software in a VM, and run APM in a hardware-in-the-loop fashion.

Stage 3. deploy my autopilot onto Raspi and interface with APM then run both hardwares in Hardware-in-the-loop fashion.

Answer 1

Adrucopter already has it's own HITL simulator, I would set up your flight system as you expect it to be setup in hardware, and depending on your sensors extend the APM HITL to include them and send the data from them back to the raspberry pi/APM in order to debug not just the operation of the autopilot system but any integration issues on both the hardware and software sides at the same time. I setup a similar system by using the HITL and adding an extension that emulated data from a pixy camera tracking a virtual object and it worked great!