Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation of UAV for Fault Injection

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in military and civilian applications. The safety of UAV has been paid more and more attention. Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) of UAV can realize the fault prediction during flight and make an appropriate response according to potential faults. Therefore, the safety and reliability of UAV are improved. However, the existing PHM research on UAVs has the following two challenges: a) the number of fault samples in historical flight data is small, and it is impossible to cover multiple fault modes of UAVs to meet the demand of modeling and verification, b) the actual flight verification of the UAV PHM technology cannot be carried out directly through actual flight test. Aiming at the above problems, this paper proposes a fault data generation method based on the Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation (HILS) technology. We construct a UAV model and its corresponding fault models by analyzing fault features of UAV flight control system. It can simulate the actual faults and generate flight data with multiple fault modes, thereby available data are provided to support PHM research. Besides, PHM algorithms implemented on airborne PHM modules can be verified via this platform in real-time. The experiment results show that the HILS platform has a good performance for fault injection.