Using unity for 3D object orientation in a virtual environment

Although Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained a lot of attention by researchers in the past couple of decades, the development of UAV safe and efficient test platforms still needs much attention. The main reason for this being the unstable nature of the platforms and the potential risks associated with multi-rotor UAVs. To address and understand the above problems, this paper introduces UAV navigation in a virtually generated environment that is coupled to the real hardware platform. The virtual environment (VE) is developed using the Unity game engine, providing users with sufficient tools to build 3 dimensional, multi-level maps. The VE parses the orientation data (received from the hardware) and depicts instances of a UAV inside the created VE maps. Thus, this approach provides a suitable environment to examine different geographical scenarios and to test control and navigation algorithms to their limits without the need to physically manoeuvre the UAV and risk damaging it while doing so.