Flying a Virtual Drone with PX4 and Gazebo
A hands-on workshop teaches engineers to validate drone autonomy by simulating GPS loss, motor faults, and sensor failures.
Dronecode community leaders Aleksandr Kalmykov and Junwoo Hwang, with keynote speaker Michael Hill, are hosting a targeted workshop to solve a critical pain point in drone development: the often-underestimated performance gap between clean simulations and unpredictable real-world drone behavior. The "Flying a Virtual Drone with PX4 and Gazebo" event, scheduled for March 21, 2026, moves beyond passive lectures to offer live, practical sessions focused on autonomy validation. The core mission is to equip engineers with workflows that ensure simulation results reliably translate to physical systems, addressing the common frustration where Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) tests pass but real drones fail.
The workshop curriculum is built for hands-on problem-solving, guiding participants through a complete PX4 and Gazebo SITL setup before deliberately injecting real-world failure modes like GPS signal loss, motor faults, and sensor degradation. Engineers will learn to write and test mission logic using MAVSDK and, crucially, analyze PX4 flight logs to understand the autopilot's decision-making process during these simulated crises. This approach is specifically designed for autonomy, robotics, and firmware engineers working on PX4-based platforms, providing them with the tools to build more robust validation pipelines. By focusing on failure simulation and log analysis, the workshop aims to significantly reduce deployment risks and improve the reliability of autonomous drone missions before they ever leave the lab.
- Live workshop on March 21, 2026, focuses on practical PX4 + Gazebo simulation workflows for autonomy validation.
- Curriculum includes simulating critical failures: GPS loss, motor faults, and sensor degradation to test robustness.
- Teaches analysis of PX4 flight logs to understand autopilot decision-making, bridging the sim-to-real gap for engineers.
Why It Matters
Helps drone engineers deploy more reliable autonomous systems by rigorously testing failure scenarios in simulation before real-world flight.