Development of Software-in-the-Loop Simulation using Airsim and Px4 for the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

The popularity of autonomous vehicles and their demand are on the rise. But, the development and testing algorithms for autonomous vehicles are costlier and time consuming one. In recent decade, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in many fields such as civil, military, and delivery purposes, etc. Therefore, it is essential to test the features of UAV before its deployment. The complexity of the software controlling and testing has also been grown in recent years. The simulator built on Unreal Engine provides physical and visual realistic simulation environment for the users. It contains a physics engine that operates at high frequency Software-In-The-Loop simulation. The simulation supports various popular protocols. Moreover, it is relatively easier to implement various components in other projects with the help of modular design. In the proposed model, the non-linear 6DOF model 3D visualization and sensor model are implemented using Airsim for the quad-rotor UAV. In addition, virtual Pixhawk hardware is used for the design and implementation of the flight control algorithm. Verifying through a simulated environment increases the safety concerns and thus reduce cost. The demonstration involves a quadcopter as an autonomous vehicle.