Design, Simulation, and Flight Test Validation of a UAV Ground Control Station for Aviation Safety Research and Pilot Modeling

Abstract

UAV Ground Control Stations (GCS) are being increasingly used for research topics such as subscale aircraft modeling, pilot modeling, pilot-aircraft interface modeling, and UAV mission evaluation. This paper presents the development, simulation, and validation of a UAV GCS with an emphasis on flight test evaluations. The development of hardware and software for both the GCS and UAV platform are introduced along with the development of a simulator for pilot training. Through both ground simulations and UAV flight tests, the capabilities of the GCS have been validated and proven to be capable of meeting current research needs as well as opening up new areas for future research.

A Review of Current Research in Subscale Flight Testing and Analysis of Its Main Practical Challenges

“…COTS autopilot systems for UAV, such as the Cloud Cap Piccolo series [157], have also been used for data logging in several projects. The gap between these two levels was filled with a variety of custom-made data acquisition solutions, most of which were based on the integration of custom and COTS sensors of different types but resulting in similar architectures [44,56,69,95,138,139,158,159]. The need for an intermediate-level system, specifically adapted to the SFT needs, has motivated the recent appearance of a few specialised COTS solutions such as the Al Volo FDAQ [45].…”

On subscale flight testing : Cost-effective techniques for research and development

“…COTS autopilot systems for UAV, such as the Cloud Cap Piccolo series [126], have also been used for data logging in several projects. The gap between these two levels was filled with a variety of custom-made data acquisition solutions, most of which were based on the integration of custom and COTS sensors of different types but resulting in similar architectures [127,128,129,130,131,132,123]. A similar attempt to develop a data acquisition system for SFT was made at Linköping University in 2008 using a Diamond Systems PC board Athena with a Pentium-III-class processor running a streamlined Linux kernel as operating system [38].…”