Hardware-in-the-loop test rig to capture aerial robot and sensor suite performance metrics

Fully autonomous aerial robots are needed to accomplish near-Earth missions such as search and rescue, and bio-chemical sensing. Recent advances in sensor technologies ([6], [8], [3], [7]) urge the aerial robotics community towards full autonomy. Only then, the sensors that are needed to detect obstacles will become more accurate, reliable, and smaller. The lack of flight test data in near-Earth environments poses a gap in the modeling and integration of obstacle detection sensors. To help advance the aerial robotics field we designed a hardware-in-the-loop system for near-Earth flying robots. The hardware-in-the-loop system generates the motion of the actual robotic aircraft in near-Earth environment by implementing model reference adaptive control (MRAC). The high-fidelity math model of the robotic aircraft is the reference model of the MRAC. The controller structure of the system is explained in this paper.