Development of a high-fidelity simulation environment for a Crazyflie2.1 quadcopter

MechatronicsSystems.Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

This paper presents an open-source, Simulink-based, high-fidelity model of a Crazyflie2.1 quadcopter, addressing the lack of an accurate, verified, and readily adaptable simulation in the MATLAB ecosystem. The 6-DOF dynamic model of the quadcopter includes non-linearities, battery drain, and off-diagonal inertia effects that are present on the physical platform. A cascaded PID control scheme, directly ported from firmware, including sensor filtering and data-type parity, is implemented in the simulation environment to align with the physical counterpart. The closed-loop simulation model is validated against real-world flight tests, with position tracking parity shown to be within 2.5 cm. This open-source framework allows for future work in model-based, low-level control modification, as well as modular use in advanced vision and swarming applications.