Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) support humans in performing an increasingly varied number of tasks. UAVs need to be remotely operated by a human pilot in many cases. Therefore, pilots require repetitive training to master the UAV movements. Nevertheless, training with an actual UAV involves high costs and risks. Fortunately, simulators are alternatives to face these difficulties. However, existing simulators lack realism, do not present flight information intuitively, and sometimes do not allow natural interaction with the human operator. This work addresses these issues through a framework for building realistic virtual simulators for the human operation of UAVs. First, the UAV is modeled in detail to perform a dynamic simulation in this framework. Then, the information of the above simulation is utilized to manipulate the elements in a virtual 3D operation environment developed in Unity 3D. Therefore, the interaction with the human operator is introduced with a proposed teleoperation algorithm and an input device. Finally, a meta-heuristic optimization procedure provides realism to the simulation. In this procedure, the flight information obtained from an actual UAV is used to optimize the parameters of the teleoperation algorithm. The quadrotor is adopted as the study case to show the proposal’s effectiveness.
Highlights
Based on the necessity of simulation tools for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) remotely controlled by human operators, this work proposes a framework to build realistic virtual simulators for the teleoperation of these vehicles
In each of the previous elements, realism is incorporated into the simulator
The modeling fully describes the behavior of a UAV and considers the non-conservative phenomena of the operating environment to develop a dynamic simulation close to reality
Summary
Today, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become very important in the activities carried out by humans. The vehicle is used as a tool to perform tasks that are impossible to carry out autonomously due to their complex nature or to the limitations of current computer systems [5,6,7,8]. The computer uses the flight information of a human pilot to teach a UAV to fly in [14]. A human operator can be dispensed under approach (1) when technology and operating environment conditions are safe and allow the UAV to fly autonomously with few restrictions and low risk. Learning to pilot UAVs is a difficult task, and the ability depends on the amount of training the human has previously received [15]. It is studied how the simulation tool has contributed to the development of UAVs
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