Design and FPGA implementation of UAV simulator for fast prototyping

Abstract

As production and advances in motor and battery cell technology progress, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining more and more acceptance and popularity. Unfortunately, the design and prototyping of UAVs is an expensive and long process. This paper proposes a fast, component based simulation environment for UAVs so that they can be roughly tested without a damage risk. Moreover, the combined effect of individual component choices can be observed with the simulator to reduce design time. The simulator is flexible in the sense that detailed aerodynamic effects and selected components models can be included. In this work, the simulator is proposed, model parameters are extracted for a particular UAV for testing the simulator and it is implemented on an field programmable gate array (FPGA) to increase simulation speed. The simulator calculates battery state of charge (SOC), position, velocity and acceleration of the UAV with gravity, drag, propeller air inflow velocity. The simulator runs on the FPGA fabric of AMD-XCKU13P with simulation steps of 1 ms.