From Simulation to Sky: Developing Autonomous UAVs with MATLAB | Dr. N Dhananjay | Robotics Café

Robotics Café #08 - Dr. N Dhananjay, MathWorks India, Bengaluru. Testing autonomous UAVs on real hardware is risky and expensive. There is a smarter way. Dr. N Dhananjay walks through how simulation workflows can help engineers develop, test, and deploy autonomous UAV systems with less risk and more confidence. Talk Abstract: Developing autonomous UAVs requires navigating a broad engineering stack — vehicle dynamics, sensor modeling, path planning, mission management, and real-time communication — while managing the risk and cost of hardware testing. This talk presents the MATLAB UAV Toolbox as an end-to-end framework for taking a UAV algorithm from firstprinciples simulation to real flight, covering both fixed-wing and multirotor vehicle types. We walk you through the toolbox's layered architecture: reduced-order guidance models (6-state fixed-wing, 12-state multirotor) that support automatic code generation; a scenario simulation environment with LiDAR, GPS/INS, radar, and atmospheric turbulence models; and a path planning suite spanning 3D Dubins curves, waypoint following, coverage planning, and Vector Field Histogram obstacle avoidance. We then show how Simulink can be used to enable model-based design workflows. We highlight software-in-the-loop (SITL), hardware-in-the-loop (HITL), and deployment to PX4 and ArduPilot autopilots via auto-generated C code. We discuss the MAVLink communication layer, including a microservice pattern that abstracts parameter management, command dispatch, and mission upload behind high-level MATLAB classes. We present post-flight analysis workflows — parsing ArduPilot and PX4 logs into MATLAB timetables, system identification techniques for refining aerodynamic and wind turbulence models from flight data. Speaker: Dr. N Dhananjay is a Senior Software Engineer at MathWorks, India. He is a member of the Autonomous Aerial Systems Group. Prior to joining MathWorks in 2017, he worked as an Image Processing Engineer at UURMI System Pvt. Ltd., Hyderabad, India where he worked on the Autonomous Landing of UAV project. Dhananjay received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from IISc, Bangalore, and his Master's in Electrical Engineering also from IISc. Currently he is working on developing tools in MATLAB/SIMULINK for autonomous UAV applications. Outline: 00:00 Intro 00:59 Talk 28:06 Outro #robotics #planning #designing #control #matlab #simulink #mathworks #iiserbhopal #monashuniversity #plakshauniversity #roboticscafé