MAVLink Matlab Library

THIS IS CURRENTLY A WORK IN PROGRESS

This project aims to produce a native Matlab implementation of MAVLink which can be added to mavgen in pymavlink. This repository will be used to store an example library to allow an overall structure to be agreed on.

Motivation

A large amount of UAV research uses the ArduPilot code base. Unlike the rest of the world the academic community is primarly uses Matlab. The abscence of Matlab support for ArduPilots communication language is therefore notable.

Implementation

The program is intented to be implemented similarly to exsisting librarys through a mixture of static and auto-generated files. The current files and folder structure are described further below.

Static Files

mavlink_msg.m contains all paramaters and methods common to every message types.

parse.m provided methods to converts incoming data stream into message objects.

checksum.m implementation x25 CRC calculations.

Auto-Generated Files

A seperate class is created for each message, all inherit from the parent mavlink_msg.m class. The class contains getter/setters for each field and methods for parsing/packing messages to their byte representation.

For each message set a header class, of the set's name, contain all message set enums is produced. The class also contains a get_message_type method for obtaining a message object from its msg id.

mavlink.m inherits from every message set header providing consistent access to all enums and get_message_type method.

Folder Structure

Static files are kept at the top level with a folder for each message set. Each message set is formed of a header class and set of message classes. (*) indicates an auto-generated file.

.
├── mavlink.m (*)
├── checksum.m
├── mavlink_msg.m
├── parser.m
├── common (*)
│   ├── common.m (*)
│   ├── mavlink_msg_???.m (*)
│   └── ...
├── ardupilotmega (*)
│   ├── ardupilotmega.m (*)
│   ├── mavlink_msg_???.m (*)
│   └── ...
└──...

Todo / Future work

• Unit-tests
• MAVLink 2 support
• Wider support (Backwards compatibility Octave, Simulink)

Licence

The source code is licenced under GNU General Public License v3.0

N.b all source code has been was written in 2018b so no gurantees of backwards compatibility