PLATFORM FOR SIMULATION AND ADJUSTMENT OF QUADROTORS CONTROLS USING ARM CORTEX-M4 AND X-PLANE

Alessandro Corrêa Mendes¹; Helosman Figueiredo¹; Ícaro Viana¹; Luiz Sandoval Gões¹; Osamu Saotome¹

¹ ITA

doi:10.20906/CPS/COB-2015-2617

Resumo

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been developed for various applications, such as search and rescue, border monitoring, building surveillance and inspection of electrical transmission lines. Aiming to test control algorithms implemented in embedded devices, this paper proposes a Hardware-in-the Loop (HIL) simulation to assess control laws. The architecture of the simulation platform consists of a simulator, that reproduces a quadrotor vehicle, interconnected to an embedded module comprising an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. Thus, the aircraft dynamics is simulated on a dedicated computer that uses the X-Plane flight simulator as part of an HIL loop. To assess the embedded control system, control laws were implemented to altitude and attitude. The main result of this work is the development of testing procedures and a simulation tool to test embedded control laws before the start of the flight test campaigns.

Palavras-chave: Hardware-in-the-Loop; Quadrotor; Cortex M4; Xplane