AirLoop: A Simulation Framework for Testing of UAV Services

doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3253788

2023-01-01

Jessica Giovagnola *

Juan B. Moro Megías

Miguel Molina

Manuel Pegalájar Cuéllar

Diego P. Morales

DOI：10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3253788

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摘要

En 中文

Sensor fusion is a critical aspect in autonomous drone navigation as several tasks, such as object detection and self-pose estimation, require combining information from heterogeneous sources. The performance of these solutions depends on several factors, such as the characteristics of the sensors and the environment, as well as the computing platforms, which can heavily impact their accuracy and response time. Carrying out such performance evaluations through real flight tests can be a resource-demanding, time-consuming, and, at times, risky process, which is why researchers often rely on simulation environments for testing and validating sensor fusion algorithms. The simulation environment should provide photorealistic environmental features, as well as a comprehensive set of sensors, in order to allow to test the most extensive set of sensor fusion algorithms. This paper presents AirLoop, an AirSim-based flight simulator for Hardware-in-the-Loop and Software-in-the-Loop algorithm testing and validation. AirLoop extends the sensor setup provided by AirSim with an FMCW RADAR sensor simulation, which has been evaluated based on the Infineon Technologies BGT60TR13C RADAR. Furthermore, this work provides several Software-in-the-Loop (SITL) and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HITL) demonstrations, including interfacing with the Pixhawk 2 flight controller and an extensive evaluation of the communication of the engine with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, which has been evaluated in various use cases, including dataset creation, object detection, Path Planning, and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM).

Keyword:

Atmospheric modeling

Drones

Robot sensing systems

Radar

Computational modeling

Cameras

Testing

Drone simulations

sensor fusion

Jetson Nano

RADAR simulation