Hardware-In-The-Loop Development Framework for Multi-Vehicle Autonomous Systems

In applications involving unmanned aerial vehicles, the use of simulation environments is typically employed to speed up the development phase, reduce the associated costs, and in particular to safely verify and validate the software behavior without jeopardizing the hardware in case of faults or bugs. In addition, testing other properties as scalability, robustness, and fault tolerance is much more convenient in simulation. Communities dealing with unmanned autonomous vehicles often develop their own custom simulation frameworks, which are often tailored to the specific system under development, with the consequence that they are either incomplete or not fully supported. To fill such a gap, this work presents a hardware-in-the-loop development simulation framework for multi-vehicle autonomous systems, addressing in particular maintainability, predictability, and capability of integrating multiple heterogeneous autopilot boards and user interface applications. The proposed framework also supports a multi-agent configuration, which is a noteworthy novel characteristic, since existing frameworks often deal with a single agent.