UAS Simulator for Modeling, Analysis and Control in Free Flight and Physical Interaction

TL;DR

This paper introduces the ARCAD simulator, a MATLAB-based tool for modeling, analyzing, and controlling various UAS types, including free flight and physical interaction, to facilitate rapid development and testing of UAV systems.

Contribution

The ARCAD simulator provides a comprehensive platform for UAS modeling, control, and interaction analysis, supporting rapid prototyping and real-world application development.

Findings

Supports multiple UAS configurations including multirotors and VTOLs

Enables analysis of control response and flight optimization

Has been used successfully in real-world applications

Abstract

This paper presents the ARCAD simulator for the rapid development of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), including underactuated and fully-actuated multirotors, fixed-wing aircraft, and Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) hybrid vehicles. The simulator is designed to accelerate these aircraft's modeling and control design. It provides various analyses of the design and operation, such as wrench-set computation, controller response, and flight optimization. In addition to simulating free flight, it can simulate the physical interaction of the aircraft with its environment. The simulator is written in MATLAB to allow rapid prototyping and is capable of generating graphical visualization of the aircraft and the environment in addition to generating the desired plots. It has been used to develop several real-world multirotor and VTOL applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/keipour/aircraft-simulator-matlab.