A Simulator for Fully-Actuated UAVs

TL;DR

This paper introduces the ARCAD simulator for fully-actuated UAVs, facilitating controller testing, design analysis, and real-world deployment, with extensions for environmental interaction and hybrid UAV designs.

Contribution

We developed the ARCAD simulator enabling rapid implementation, testing, and analysis of controllers and UAV designs, including environmental interactions and hybrid configurations.

Findings

Enabled real-world deployment of UAV fleets

Supported diverse controller implementations

Extended to simulate environmental interactions

Abstract

This workshop paper presents the challenges we encountered when simulating fully-actuated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for our research and the solutions we developed to overcome the challenges. We describe the ARCAD simulator that has helped us rapidly implement and test different controllers ranging from Hybrid Force-Position Controllers to advanced Model Predictive Path Integrals and has allowed us to analyze the design and behavior of different fully-actuated UAVs. We used the simulator to enable real-world deployments of our fully-actuated UAV fleet for different applications. The simulator is further extended to support the physical interaction of UAVs with their environment and allow more UAV designs, such as hybrid VTOLs. The code for the simulator can be accessed from https://github.com/keipour/aircraft-simulator-matlab.