Hardware-in-the-loop Test Rig for Designing Near-earth Aerial Robotics

Today’s aerial robots are being tasked to fly in nearEarth 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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Vefa Narli, Paul Y. Oh
• Keywords: Actual Robotic Aircraft, ICRA 2006, Rig Motion Response, Robotics, Today’s Aerial Robots