An educational simulation platform for GPS-denied unmanned Aerial Vehicles aimed to the detection and tracking of moving objects

The main motivation of this work is to show, for educational purposes, that the visual based object tracking problem can be illustrated through the simulation-in-the-loop approach: by using the MathWorks^™ Virtual Reality Toolbox together with Matlab^®, it is possible to simulate the behavior of a drone in a 3D environment when detection and control algorithms are run. Matlab VR is used due to the familiarity that students have with. In this way the attention can be moved to the classifier, the references generator and the trajectory tracking control. Each block is decoupled and independent, so it can be easily replaced with others thus simplifying the development phase.