Simulink Based Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator for Rapid Prototyping of UAV Control Algorithms

This paper describes a recently developed architecture for a Hardware-in-the-Loop simulator 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 system 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.