Research On Rapid Prototyping Simulation For Small UAV

As the important segments in flight control system development of UAV, mathematical simulationand Hardware-In-the-Loop simulation are two main ways of flight simulation. Using mathematicalmodel to describes the UAV, mathematical simulation is usually used to verify the performance ofcontrol algorithm. Taking several physical objects part in the loop, Hardware-In-the-Loop simulationis usually be used to verify the performance of the whole flight control system with a high confidencelevel, but the development of Hardware-In-the-Loop simulator is complicated with heavy workload forcoding. This paper developed a simulation system for sample UAV, achieving the rapid simulation forflight control system and improving the reliability of the simulation results.In the first, the6-DOFs nonlinear mathematical model of UAV was built by applying the Newtonrigid body dynamics in inertial space with atmospheric disturbance, for the following flight simulation.Also the models of sensors and actuators was built, establishing the foundation for the simulationsoftware. After that, the structure of the real-time simulation software was designed, and the simulinkmodel of simulation software was built, according to the simulink model of UAV. For application ofrapid prototyping technology on RTW, this paper developed the PC-based Software-In-the-Loopsimulator, taking rtwintgt as target configuration and changing the6-DOFs nonlinear mathematicalmodel of UAV into the real-time simulation environment based on PC, and generated the real-time Ccodes of simulation software and transplanted them to target computer, for the Hareware-In-the-Loopsimulation of flight control system. In addition, we developed the visual simulation module based onFlightGear, to display the three-dimensional visual information of flight status and environment duringsimulation.Finally, this paper tested the Software-In-the-Loop simulator and the Hardware-In-the-Loopsimulator in the sides of accuracy, functionality and real-time characteristic. The results showed that therapid prototyping simulation platform based on RTW was accurate and reliable, and the performancesmeet the requirements of flight simulation for sample UAV.