This paper is concerned with the first work on the integration of digital twin (DT), 5G, cloud platform, and virtual reality (VR) technologies for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) autonomy development. DT focuses on connecting the virtual and physical world as an emerging strategic technology. Initially, it was implemented through mirror models of physical objects to realize the monitoring of their whole life cycle in the manufacturing area. In recent years, DT technologies have been applied in different fields, and some typical DT solutions have been proposed to solve complex system problems. In this paper, we study the problem of how to combine the DT and other emerging technologies for UAV autonomy development and supervision, aiming to propose a basic DT framework to integrate DT and UAVs as reference rules for building DT systems, which includes four parts, that is, Virtual Space, Real Space, Service Center, and Data and Model Processing Center. Based on the proposed basic DT framework, a cloud-based DT system is then further constructed in which cloud platform, 5G, and VR are integrated seamlessly. The running and implementation processes of each subsystem are introduced in detail. Multiple experiments are conducted to verify the usefulness of proposed DT system, that is, real-time system monitoring and cloud processing, VR connection, human–robot interaction through VR technology, and so on. The experimental results show that the proposed DTUAV system can be used in the interaction of virtual and physical systems, remote supervision, intelligence integration of swarm of unmanned vehicles, and so on. The development in our work introduces the DT into unmanned system applications and can promote relevant research in this direction. All implementation codes of the system will be shared in https://github.com/DTUAV .
