Development of multi-quadrotor simulator based on real-time hypervisor systems

Abstract

Today, simulator technology has been widely used as an important part of quadrotor development such as validation and testing. A good quadrotor simulator can simulate the quadrotor system as closely as possible to the real one. Therefore, in case of multi-quadrotor simulator, the simulator should not only can simulate a multi-quadrotor system, but also every quadrotor should be able to leverage their own resources. To solve this issues, in this paper, we present a hypervisor-based multi-quadrotor simulator. We used RT-Xen as hypervisor, a real-time Xen hypervisor. To ensure every quadrotor runs in real-time manner, we implemented quadrotor simulator in Litmus-RT which is a real-time extension of Linux. In this paper, we conducted some testing and performance evaluation for particular cases on our multi-quadrotor simulator: step-input responses, computation time, and response times. Based on the performance evaluation, our hypervisor-based multi-quadrotor simulator environment is proven to meet the real-time requirements. The results show that three important tasks in quadrotor system: Stability Controllability Augmented System (SCAS), Equation of Motion (EOM), and waypoint following task, are finished before their deadlines; in fact, 20 ms, 10 ms, and 40 ms before the deadlines for SCAS, EOM, and waypoint following, respectively.