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MAVLink Support

Micro Air Vehicle Link communication protocol, dialects and messages

The Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink) communication protocol is a message protocol for sending and receiving messages between UAVs. The protocol uses a publish-subscribe pattern for data streams with specified topics and message types. There are different sub-protocols for missions and parameters. Use the MAVLink supported functions to specify predefined or custom dialects, setup clients, and send or receive messages.

To protect UAVs from unauthorized messages, MAVLink uses message signing. Note that message signing is not the same as message encryption and MAVLink does not provide message encryption. For more information about MAVLink message signing, see MAVLink Message Signing (Authentication).

The MAVLink message definitions (dialects) and MAVLink serialization helper functions in UAV Toolbox are obtained from mavlink/message_definitions/v1.0/ and mavlink/c_library_v2 version of repositories respectively.

The message definition XML files and the C-language version of serialization helper functions are made available under the MIT license.

Functions

mavlinktlogRead MAVLink message from TLOG file (Since R2019a)
mavlinkioConnect with MAVLink clients to exchange messages (Since R2019a)
mavlinkclientMAVLink client information (Since R2019a)
mavlinksubReceive MAVLink messages (Since R2019a)
mavlinkdialectParse and store MAVLink dialect XML (Since R2019a)
mavlinksigningStore MAVLink signing channel information (Since R2022a)
addmavlinkkeysAdd MAVLink keys from .env file (Since R2023a)
lsmavlinkkeysList MAVLink keys in MATLAB session (Since R2023a)
rmmavlinkkeysRemove MAVLink key from MATLAB session (Since R2023a)

Blocks

MAVLink Blank MessageCreate blank MAVLink message bus by specifying payload information and MAVLink message type (Since R2020b)
MAVLink DeserializerConvert serialized uint8 MAVLink data stream to Simulink nonvirtual bus (Since R2020b)
MAVLink SerializerSerialize messages of MAVLink packet by converting Simulink nonvirtual bus to uint8 data stream (Since R2020b)