Vision-Based Hardware-in-the-Loop-Simulation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper proposes a new configuration of a general hardware-in-the-loop-simulation (HILS) setup of Unmanned Aerial vehicle (UAV) especially for vision algorithm. In our setup, the Gazebo software is used to simulate six-degree-of-freedom (6 DOF) model and corresponding sensor readings such as the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and the camera for a quad-rotor UAV. Meanwhile, the flight control algorithm is performed on the Pixhawk hardware. The Raspberry hardware is installed the vision algorithms to estimate the position of the quad-rotor UAV for the landing task. The middle software named control application software (CAS) is developed to collect the communication between the Gazebo, Pixhawk and Raspberry by using the multithread architecture. Numerical implementation has been performed to prove effectiveness of the suggested HILS components approach.