A hardware-in-the-loop test rig for designing near-earth aerial robotics

Abstract

Today's aerial robots are being tasked to fly in near-Earth environments such as caves, forests and buildings. The lack of flight data and performance metrics poses a gap that prevents the analytical design of such robots. This paper describes a test rig with a full-scalediorama in its workspace. Lamps, fans, and generatorsallow the control of lighting, gust and obscurantsto emulate conditions found in near-Earth environments.The rig's motions resemble the actual roboticaircraft through model reference adaptive control; sensordata feed into a high-fidelity math model of theaircraft's dynamics to generate rig motion response.©2006 IEEE.