Recreation of 3D UAS Flights in High-Realism Virtual Environments

This article presents an approach for recreating experimental Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight in the state-of-the-art 3D simulation software. Through the use of the Unreal Engine, AirSim simulator, and the Cesium for Unreal plugin with Google Maps, we demonstrate replicating an experiment of a real-world flight in the digital twin environment of the same location. Work investigates the viability of replicating real-world experiments by assessing the similarity between the experimental results of the real-world and digital twin experiments. The experiments involve analyzing the image telemetry and map generated of the real-world and digital twin images using the Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) algorithm. The results have shown that replicating the real-world experiment in the digital environment produces similar results to those seen in the real-world. This will allow researchers to explore the impact of sensor, vehicle, and algorithm parameters in a controlled, repeatable environment before real-world deployment.