Visual simulation system for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles

The research on the control of four-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), known as quadrotor UAV, is an important research area of unmanned aerial vehicles. Normally, numerical simulation is utilized to verify the control design performance. However, the simulation results are not visual. In this paper, a novel visual simulation system based on a flight simulator software, named as FlightGear, and Matlab/Simulink is developed for quadrotor UAVs. Coordinate transfer from inertial frame of the quadrotor UAV employed by Matlab/Simulink to geodetic coordinates employed by FlightGear is introduced. In addition, an S-function block based on FlightGear communication protocol is proposed. This visual simulation system has the abilities for on-line and off-line simulation. Plus, it can be run on local simulation computer or other computers via network.