HARDWARE-IN-THE-LOOP SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT FOR TESTING OF TILT-ROTOR UAV’S CONTROL STRATEGIES

ARTHUR  V. LARA; IURO  B. P. NASCIMENTO; JANIER  ARIAS-GARCIA; LEANDRO  BUSS BECKER; GUILHERME  V. RAFFO

doi:10.20906/CBA2022/108

ARTHUR V. LARA Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
IURO B. P. NASCIMENTO UFMG - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
JANIER ARIAS-GARCIA UFMG - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
LEANDRO BUSS BECKER UFSC - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
GUILHERME V. RAFFO UFMG - Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

DOI: https://doi.org/10.20906/CBA2022/108

Keywords: Tilt-rotor UAV, Hardware-in-the-loop, Embedded systems, Robotic simulator, Control systems

Abstract

This paper presents a hardware-in-the-loop simulation environment for testing of control strategies for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Tilt-rotor configuration. This proposal consists of a distributed system composed by a general purpose computer, that runs the Gazebo simulator, and a stm32f4 discovery development board, that executes the control strategy. For instrumentation and reference data transfer it was developed a serial communication protocol that includes an error-detecting method for serial transmissions, which uses a checksum for accidental change detection in data transfer chains. Besides, it was created a dynamic library in order to provide an external channel with Gazebo Simulator to allow interaction between simulation and embedded system. Also it was designed a trajectory creator program to select the reference points to be reached by the control strategy, being either automatically or manually via joystick. Finally, the system is validated through simulation of a Tilt-rotor UAV being controlled by a DLQR strategy.