A low-cost hardware-in-the-loop-simulation testbed of quadrotor UAV and implementation of nonlinear control schemes

Abstract

SUMMARYDesigning and testing flight control algorithms for quadrotor UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) is not an easy task due to the risk of possible danger and damage during the practical flight. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of the flight control implementation, a low-cost real-time HILS (hardware-in-the-loop simulation) testbed for quadrotor UAVs is developed in this paper. To realize the HILS testbed, a miniature quadrotor is used as the main body, equipped with a micro AHRS (attitude heading reference system) unit and a self-build DSP (digital signal processor) board. The HILS is implemented by using xPC target. A compact PC/104 computer is utilized as the target computer, and a laptop PC is employed as the host computer. A desktop PC is used as flight visualization computer which runs FlightGear and Google Earth to show visual data, such as orientation and flight path of the quadrotor UAV. This testbed can be utilized for simulating various flight control algorithms, without losing safeness and reliableness. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed testbed, a new nonlinear adaptive sliding mode based stabilization control algorithm is developed and verified on the HILS testbed.