• autonomous system
• flight control
• hardware in the loop
• matlab
• realtime operating system
• simulink
• unmanned aerial vehicle

The objective of this thesis is to provide a set of tools to support the development of navigation, guidance, and control algorithms for unmanned aerial vehicles. More precisely, the final goal is to build a friendly programming framework for supporting hardware-in-the-loop simulations. The possibility to run the generated code directly on the target device can provide a feasible way to verify and validate the performance of the various control components without requiring the real flight tests. For this reason, this technique reduces the development time and cost, eliminates the risk of crashes, while making use of the control system that will be employed in the final implementation.
The work first presents a preliminary analysis of existing solutions and possible simulator architectures. A more specific analysis of the target device under interest is carried out. Hardware capabilities and limits are discussed to verify the feasibility of the hardware-in-the-loop simulation. The part of the firmware involved in the simulation loop has been inspected and integrated with the required features.
The contribution of this work consists in a deep analysis of the simulation issues (typically neglected in the existing solutions) and in the development of a new structure to take them into account.
The simulation environment developed under this thesis is also able to manage timing constraints specified on the computational activities. Performance tests have been run to verify the reliability of the framework. The obtained results, besides demonstrating the correct functionality of the application, showed which component could be improved in a future work.