matlab and quadrotor sim (hector_quadrotor)

Dear friends,

I need a quadrator for my experiment and I used the hector quadrorot package. I followed the instruction described in the official tutorial and I have the outdoor simulation running in my hydro ros vm.

Using matlab I can connect successfully but the problem is that when I add listener to the /scan topic using the following command:

scan = receive(laser,3)

I get timeout error, I tried even 23 instead of 3. In addition when I try to send message to /cmd_vel for example a linear X value in velocity I can't see any response in the gazebo window.

Has anybody tried this successfully? Do you recommend any other quad rotor simulation in ROS that works with Matlab interface?