A hardware in the loop simulation platform for vision-based control of unmanned air vehicles

Design and testing of control algorithms for unmanned air vehicles (UAV’s) is difficult due to the delicate and expensive nature of UAV systems, the risk of damage to property during testing, and government regulations. This necessitates extensive simulation of controllers to ensure stability and performance. However, simulations cannot capture all aspects of a flight control, such as sensor noise and actuator lag. For these reasons, hardware in the loop simulation (HILS) platforms are used. In this paper, a novel HILS platform is presented for vision-based control of UAV’s. This HILS platform consists of virtual reality software to produce realistic scenes projected onto a screen and viewed by a camera. Flight hardware includes an UAV with onboard autopilot interfaced to the virtual reality software. This UAV can be mounted in a wind tunnel, allowing attitude regulation through servoing the airfoils.

[1]  Raja Sengupta,et al.  Obstacle Detection for Small Autonomous Aircraft Using Sky Segmentation , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[2]  Marko Bacic,et al.  Extension and application of a novel hardware-in-the-loop simulator design methodology , 2008, 2008 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[3]  Paul Y. Oh,et al.  Hardware-in-the-loop test rig for designing near-earth aerial robotics , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[4]  A. Kurdila,et al.  Vision-based control of micro-air-vehicles: progress and problems in estimation , 2004, 2004 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37601).

[5]  M. Steurer,et al.  A novel approach to power quality assessment: real time hardware-in-the-loop test bed , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery.

[6]  P. Perona,et al.  Motion estimation via dynamic vision , 1996, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control..

[7]  Kevin L. Moore,et al.  Range identification for perspective dynamic system with single homogeneous observation , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[8]  Marko Bacic,et al.  Towards a Low-Cost Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulator for Free Flight Simulation of UAVs , 2005 .

[9]  Olivier Faugeras,et al.  Motion and Structure from Motion in a piecewise Planar Environment , 1988, Int. J. Pattern Recognit. Artif. Intell..

[10]  G. Stoeppler,et al.  Hardware-in-the-loop simulation of machine tools and manufacturing systems , 2005 .

[11]  M.R. Emami,et al.  An Architecture for Robotic Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation , 2006, 2006 International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation.

[12]  Marko Bacic.  On prediction of aircraft trajectory at high-angles of attack: Preliminary results for a pitching airfoil , 2008 .

[13]  Guoqiang Hu,et al.  A quaternion formulation for homography-based visual servo control , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[14]  Rama Chellappa,et al.  Estimating the Kinematics and Structure of a Rigid Object from a Sequence of Monocular Images , 1991, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[15]  R. Lind,et al.  State Estimation using Optical Flow from Parallax-Weighted Feature Tracking , 2006 .

[16]  Olivier D. Faugeras,et al.  Some Properties of the E Matrix in Two-View Motion Estimation , 1989, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[17]  Warren E. Dixon,et al.  Range identification for perspective vision systems , 2003, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control..

[18]  Eun-Jung Song,et al.  An Instrumentation System Applied to Formation Flight , 2002, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[19]  Nidal Jodeh,et al.  Development of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Research Platform: Modeling and Simulating with Flight Test Validation , 2006 .

[20]  E. Martin,et al.  Control strategies for hardware-in-the-loop simulation of flexible space robots , 2000 .

[21]  Zhao-Ying Zhou,et al.  Vision-based horizon extraction for micro air vehicle flight control , 2005, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas..

[22]  Xiao Xiao,et al.  Vision-based road-following using a small autonomous aircraft , 2004, 2004 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720).

[23]  Eugene L. Duke.  V&V of flight and mission-critical software , 1989, IEEE Software.

[24]  Andrew J. Kurdila,et al.  Maneuvering and Tracking for a Micro Air Vehicle Using Vision-Based Feedback , 2004 .

[25]  Robert C. Bolles,et al.  Random sample consensus: a paradigm for model fitting with applications to image analysis and automated cartography , 1981, CACM.

[26]  H. Hanselmann.  Hardware-in-the Loop Simulation as a Standard Approach for Development, Customization, and Production Test of ECU's , 1993 .

[27]  H. C. Longuet-Higgins,et al.  A computer algorithm for reconstructing a scene from two projections , 1981, Nature.

[28]  M. E. Galassi,et al.  GNU SCIENTI C LIBRARY REFERENCE MANUAL , 2005 .

[29]  Frank L. Lewis,et al.  Aircraft Control and Simulation , 1992 .

[30]  Eric N. Johnson,et al.  USE OF FLIGHT SIMULATION TO COMPLEMENT FLIGHT TESTING OF LOW-COST UAVS , 2001 .

[31]  Rolf Isermann,et al.  Hardware-in-the-loop simulation for the design and testing of engine-control systems , 1998 .

[32]  Stefano Soatto,et al.  Structure from Motion Causally Integrated Over Time , 2002, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[33]  David Lorge Parnas,et al.  Concurrent control with “readers” and “writers” , 1971, CACM.