Hardware-in-loop simulation testbed for quadrotor aerial vehicles

In order to improve the safety and efficiency of the flight control design of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a hardware-in-loop testbed is proposed in this paper. A miniature quadrotor aeromodel is used as the main-body of the testbed, and an MTi inertial measurement unit (IMU) is employed to measure the orientation angles of the quadrotor. A PC/104-bus embedded computer module is utilized as the simulation computer, and a TI-TMS320F28335 digital signal processor (DSP) is used as the low-level controller to control the four motors on the quadrotor. The real-time control tasks are accomplished via xPC target of the Matlab Real-Time Windows Target toolbox. FlightGear and Google Earth are utilized to display the orientation and flight path of the quadrotor UAV in real-time. Different control algorithms can be verified in the proposed testbed easily, without losing safeness and reliableness. Plus, the testbed can take the full advantage of the numerical simulation functions of Matlab. It provides a very reliable verification methods for the control algorithms before the real flight test. Hardware-in-loop simulation results for a PD hovering controller are provided in the paper to demonstrate the performance of the proposed testbed.