MAVSim ArduPlane Container

This is the Dockerfile to setup the current public version of MAVSim in an Alpine Linux container with ArduPilot SITL. This uses ArduPlane.

Note: We all use Macs, so this by defaults work of MacOS, so you may have to tweak for Windows and Linux

Postgres Pre-requisite

For logging, a Postgres database is needed. If one is not setup then logging will not record anything.

Postgres Container Setup using Kitematic

1. Click on the +NEW button and search for "postgres"
2. Use the Official postgres container (the one with the elephant logo below)
   
   
3. Stop the container from running and add POSTGRES_PASSWORD to the Environmental Variables. Set it to something secure and rememberable. SAVE this change.
4. With the container running, open a terminal using the EXEC button. In that shell, become the postgres user
   
   # su postgres
   
   then open postgres

     # psql
     psql (9.6.4)
     Type "help" for help.
     postgres=#

5. Create a database then exit with \q

     postgres=# CREATE DATABASE apm_missions;
     CREATE DATABASE
     postgres=# \q

6. Close the terminal, you now have a working local version of the Postgres database. Be mindful that it may not be persistent, so be sure to learn about pg_dump if you want to save and eventually restore data.

Postgres on AWS

You can also setup a cloud hosted Postgres database on the Amazon Cloud, which can be persistent and backed-up regularly. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL for detailed information.

Note: MAVSim by default writes a lot of data to a database, so be careful of lag if using a remote database. They are better setup as a follower to a local database.

Useful database tool

If you want to look at data on your database and edit or test access and data, then take a look at pgAdmin (highly recommended) or the FREE version of Valentina Studio.

Setup Container

This is pre-build on Docker Cloud, so if you need to adjust please look at the container/develop in the MAVSim Public repository

Containers can be volatile, so please be sure setup to save changes if you want to preserve your work.

Running mavsim with ArduPilot/ArduPlane

1. Running the container will startup a running MAVSim instance. Configure via the container environment variables.
2. Alternatively, one can open (i.e., EXEC button on Kitematic or docker exec on command line) a shell for mavsim and cd /mavsim (you should already be there, but just in case). Run ./mavsim.py in that shell. MAVSim will run ArduPilot and everything else for you. If you need to stop MAVSim, use Control-C.

Note: You will have to kill all mavsim, simvehicle and jsbsim instances before running your own as described in 2.

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The mavsim-arduplane Docker Container is maintained by G. Michael Youngblood at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC, a Xerox company) in California. It is licensed under GPLv3.