Research On UAV Rapid Prototyping Simulation Based On VxWorks

Flight simulation system provides a high level of credibility simulation verification platform tocheck the correctness, completeness and robustness of flight control system. Flight simulationsoftware is an important part of the flight simulation system, which requires not only functionalcorrectness and completeness, but also the demand of real-time performance and reliability. With theexpanded scale and increased functional complexity of the simulation software, the traditional andtext-based development method of simulation software is hard to meet these requirements. In order todevelop high-quality simulation software more efficiently, the rapid prototyping technology is appliedto the developing of simulation software to improve the modularity and productivity of the software,also to accelerate the development process of simulation system.Firstly, the rapid prototyping technology and the steps of developing flight simulation softwareusing this technology are introduced based on the analysis of traditional developing method of flightsimulation system. According to the hardware configuration of the sample simulation system, thewhole software designing and developing schemes are provided with the analysis of the requirementsof simulation software.Then, based on the overall design of the simulation software, the6-DOFs model of UAV, theactuator model and the sensor model are established respectively in MATLAB/Simulink. The moredeeply design process of software modules is carried out in detail to accomplish the development ofthe functional modules. By the combination of the user-written driver code, communication code,remaining supplementary code and the C code which is transformed from the model built in Simulinkby RTW technology, the flight simulation software could be developed rapidly based on VxWorks.Finally, in order to verify the functionality and performance of designed flight simulationsoftware developed by rapid prototyping technology, the singular and multiple test programs arepresented to implement the experimental evaluation and semi-physical simulation with flight controlsystem. The results show that the developed flight simulation system using rapid prototypingtechnology has good real-time performance, completeness and high confidence level, and itsfunctionality and performance adequately meet the simulation requirements for flight control system.