Hardware and Software-in-the-Loop Simulation of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

none3Simulation has reached great goals in parallel with the evolution of computers and calculation resources. Thus, in the last decade, it has become a fundamental tool in the field of complex dynamic systems modeling and control. The employment of UAVs, thanks to the better reliability and costs reduction, is recently arousing great interest both in military and civil application and the need to create autonomous guidance systems in order to cover a safe and successful mission profile makes the use of real time simulation a great test stand for the analysis of sensors and actuators and design of control systems. The University of Bologna is involved with the Italian Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), in the design of an UAV system for monitoring and smoke analysis of Stromboli volcano (Sicily, Italy). To this aim a simulation platform has been developed in Matlab/Simulink environment; it is made of 1) aircraft dynamics equations of motion, 2) sensors and actuators models, and 3) Guidance, Control and Navigation (GNC) system. Control laws are implemented in three different nested loop while the mission planning is managed by a user definable list of waypoints. During the simulation the user has visual feedback of the aircraft trajectory in the mission scenario provided by FlightGear (real time) and Google Earth (post-processing). In order to test the GNC system, the set of control laws written in Simulink blocks will be coded in C language code and a stand-alone executable is created. The software is then installed in the actual on board PC, an x86-compatible optimized for embedded application. The application is executed by a high-performance hard real-time operating system for hardware in the loop testing. The present paper aims at describing the simulation test bench as well as numerical results.noneE.L. de Angelis; F. Giulietti; M. TurciE.L. de Angelis; F. Giulietti; M. Turc