A Real-Time, Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation of an Unmanned Aerial Research Vehicle

Simulation is a valuable tool for rapidly and cost effectively developing and verifying new systems. This report describes the design and development of a system which simulates an unmanned aircraft and verifies the proper operation of its flight computer. Flight computers, being time critical devices, must execute at a certain rate in order to safely and accurately control an aircraft. In order to verify the proper operation of the flight computer, the simulation must execute in 'real-time', which is a rate of 100 Hz for this flight computer. The flight computer's inputs and outputs are connected to the simulation so that the flight computer thinks it is flying. The simulation architecture is a VME-based computer system, consisting of an input board (designed for this project) which demodulates 13 channels of pulse-width modulated signals, a processor board which executes the simulation software, and a digital-to-analog output board. The existing simulation software was ported to the C language and re-hosted on a 68030 processor board. Additional software was written to handle all the I/O and data conversions. The system accurately simulates the unmanned aircraft, runs in real-time, and verifies the proper operation of the flight computer... Unmanned, Unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV, Simulation, Hardware in the Loop simulation VME-based system.