Autopilot Simulator for Aerial Vehicles: An introduction to the fundamentals of simulating realistic flight and sensory outputs for testing autopilot performance

Autopilots have become accessible to hobbyists and entrepreneurs with recent advances in sensors and drone vehicles. This has sparked a boom of interest and created a new type of consumer products that are still in their infant stages, such as Amazon's drone delivery service or drones taking photos of you while hiking. Experimenting in the real world is too expensive and time consuming, so a simulator software is used to mimic the flight characteristics and sensory outputs in order to test the autopilot performance. To better understand all the moving parts, this book takes on writing the simulator software from scratch and covers the essential theory domains; aerodynamics, sensory characteristics, state estimation, controller loops, autopilot design and real-time simulation. This book is intended as a thorough introduction to autopilots and simulation software. The software was able to successfully navigate a virtual RC helicopter through waypoints while avoiding crashing into terrains and countering winds based on realistically modeled sensory outputs. Source code is published at: https://bitbucket.org/anjdreas/helicopterautopilotsim

Andreas G. Larsen, M.C.S: Studied computer science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). CTO of Initial Force AS, Norway.