A Hardware-in-loop Platform for Rotary-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This work describes the development of a platform to deal with simulated and real autonomous flights of rotary-wing aircrafts. Such platform (called AuRoRa Platform) was designed for use with commercial miniature helicopters and embeds the instrumentation necessary to autonomously guide the aircraft. Aiming at such objective, an electronic board specific to actuate over the servomotors of the helicopter and to get the data delivered by the sensors onboard the aircraft (all them "components of the shelf"), called AuRoRa Board was designed and manufactured. The AuRoRa Platform was implemented to exchange information with such a board, as a high level Hardware-in-the-Loop platform, capable of running simulations and real experiments, in the last case actuating over the servomotors of the aircraft through the electronic board aforementioned. Using the AuRoRa Platform one can choose amongst various aircrafts (we have already tested it with the quadrotor AR.Drone Parrot and the miniature helicopters ALIGN T-REX 450 and T-REX 600 these two latter ones are the aircrafts dealt with in this work) and amongst different controllers as well. The AuRoRa Platform also presents a decentralized characteristic: to avoid overloading a single computer with the synthesis of the control signals and the online exhibition of the flight data, a feature enabled/disbled by the user, it is possible to run the online exhibition of the flight data in a second computer, using an UDP communication channel.