Simulink Based Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator for Rapid Prototyping

This paper describes a recently developed architecture for a Hardware-in-the-Loop sim-ulator for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The principal idea is to use the advanced modeling capabilities of Simulink rather than hard-coded software as the flight dynamics simulating engine. By harnessing Simulink’s ability to precisely model virtually any dynamical sys-tem or phenomena this newly developed simulator facilitates the development, validation and verification steps of flight control algorithms. Although the presented architecture is used in conjunction with a particular commercial autopilot, the same approach can be easily implemented on a flight platform with a different autopilot. The paper shows the implementation of the flight modeling simulation component in Simulink supported with an interfacing software to a commercial autopilot. This offers the academic community numerous advantages for hardware-in-the-loop simulation of flight dynamics and control tasks. The developed setup has been rigorously tested under a wide variety of conditions. Results from hardware-in-the-loop and real flight tests are presented and compared to validate its adequacy and assess its usefulness as a rapid prototyping tool. I