Flight Simulation for the Development of an Experimental UAV

Abstract

The use of flight simulation tools to reduce the schedule, risk, and required amount of flight testing for complex aerospace systems is a well-recognized benefit of these approaches. However, some special challenges arise when one attempts to obtain these benefits for the development and operation of an Experimental Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system. These types of UAV systems are characterized by the need for the need for continual checkout of experimental software and hardware. Also, flight-testing can be further leveraged by complementing research results with flight-test validated simulation results for the same experimental UAV. In this paper, flight simulation architectures for system design, integration, and operation of an experimental helicopter-based UAV, the GTMax, are explored, and the development of a simulation tool described. The chosen helicopter-based UAV platform (a Yamaha R-Max) is well instrumented: differential GPS, inertial measurement unit, sonar altimeter, radar altimeter, and a 3-axis magnetometer. One or two flight processors can be utilized.

Real-Time Neural Network Based Online Identification Technique for a UAV Platform

“…Here the Autopilot unit is subjected to a similar situation as it would experience during the actual flight. Different universities have come up with their own versions of validation of the control techniques [17][18][19]. The major drawbacks in most of these validation techniques are either they are cumbersome to implement with complicated operating systems or were not implemented on a real-time platform.…”

Development of an onboard system for flight data collection of a small-scale UAV helicopter

“…Thus, the development of a UAV with a small-scale low-cost helicopter becomes possible and has been investigated by a number of research institutes. For example, the robotics institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) [5], the MIT UAV team [6,7], the University of Berkeley [8], Georgia Tech [9] and the Stanford University [10] have developed fully or partially autonomous helicopters over the past decade. More recently, National University of Singapore (NUS) UAV team has made great progress on designing small-scale UAV helicopters and reported a series of research results on both hardware and software designs [11,12].…”

Hardware-in-the-loop Simulation Design for Evaluation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Control Systems

“…6 On the other end of the spectrum are the relatively common UAV research efforts at universities; however, descriptions of those simulations tend to focus on high level architecture and are short on detail. [7][8][9] The three main steps in this development of the hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation and basic control laws are: 1) design and code the software drivers and other tools that interface the control system with the external, real world sensors and actuators; 2) design the simulations that will test the control system and implement that design in a Simulink † simulation of the nonlinear dynamics, a Simulink simulation of the linear dynamics (which is used to develop the control system), and the final simulation that runs directly on the avionics computer; and 3) develop the control system and associated components, including the reference trajectory generator, sensor filters, and sensor models, and test them in the full nonlinear simulation based in the avionics computer. The next three sections describe each of these steps in detail.…”