Hardware-in-the-loop simulation of a UAV autonomous landing algorithm implemented in SoC FPGA
This provides a low-cost and simple method for testing high-level perception and control algorithms on embedded platforms for UAV applications, but it is incremental as it applies existing simulation and hardware techniques to a specific case.
The paper tackles the problem of testing UAV autonomous landing algorithms by developing a hardware-in-the-loop simulation system using an SoC FPGA, which successfully processes a 1280 x 720 @ 60 fps video stream in real time with no delays affecting control stability.
This paper presents a system for hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulation of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control algorithms implemented on a heterogeneous SoC FPGA computing platforms. The AirSim simulator running on a PC and an Arty Z7 development board with a Zynq SoC chip from AMD Xilinx were used. Communication was carried out via a serial USB link. An application for autonomous landing on a specially marked landing strip was selected as a case study. A landing site detection algorithm was implemented on the Zynq SoC platform. This allowed processing a 1280 x 720 @ 60 fps video stream in real time. Performed tests showed that the system works correctly and there are no delays that could negatively affect the stability of the control. The proposed concept is characterised by relative simplicity and low implementation cost. At the same time, it can be applied to test various types of high-level perception and control algorithms for UAV implemented on embedded platforms. We provide the code developed on GitHub, which includes both Python scripts running on the PC and C code running on Arty Z7.