Hardware in the loop based 6DoF test platform for multi-rotor UAV
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) rely on robust control algorithms to accomplish their mission. But, the classical design and testing process with its multiple stages; enormous resources, efforts and a long cycle of time are exhausted. In addition, the process has another serious drawback which is the simulation delay where the simulation period is too long especially for complex embedded systems with multi parameters. In this paper, we present an effective method for designing, evaluating and testing any multi-rotor UAV flight control system, through building up a six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) indoor flight environment for real-time simulation, based on MATLAB-Simulink/FPGA Hardware-In-the-Loop simulation (HIL). The platform aims to increase the development process pace and simplify its complexity. Also, the use of FPGA accelerates the simulation to decrease simulation lag. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed testbed, an attitude estimation algorithm based on direction cosine matrix(DCM) is developed and verified on the HIL testbed.