HILS based Waypoint Simulation for Fixed Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

Hardware in loop simulation HILS-based waypoint simulation for fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicles is proposed in this paper. It uses an open-source arducopter as a flight controller, mission planner, and X-plane simulator. Waypoint simulation is carried out in the flight controller and executed in an X-plane simulator through a mission planner. A fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicle with an inverted T tail configuration has been chosen to study and validate waypoint flight control algorithms. The data transmission between mission planner and flight controller is done by serial protocol, whereas data exchange between X-plane and mission planner is done by User Datagram Protocol (UDP). APM mission planner is used as a machine interface to exchange data between the flight controller and the user. User inputs and flight gain parameters, both inner loop and outer loop, can be modified with the help of a mission planner. In addition to that, the mission planner provides a visual output representation of flight data and navigation algorithm.