ROSplane: Fixed-wing autopilot for education and research

This paper presents a fixed-wing autopilot code base called ROSplane. ROSplane utilizes the ROSflight board, firmware, and driver, which was developed to make autopilot development faster, easier and cheaper. By leveraging a textbook and university course content, the autopilot facilitates education and accelerates research and development. The textbook provides high-level documentation for the code. The code is structured to facilitate learning by providing a framework for student assignments. The addition of ROSplane software and documentation make ROSflight closer to a plug-and-play solution while maintaining simplicity and usability for researchers and students. ROSplane has been used in a graduate level flight dynamics class, demonstrated through test flights, and modified for research purposes.