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

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-scale diorama in its workspace. Lamps, fans, and generators allow the control of lighting, gust and obscurants to emulate conditions found in near-Earth environments. The rig's motions resemble the actual robotic aircraft through model reference adaptive control; sensor data feed into a high-fidelity math model of the aircraft's dynamics to generate rig motion response