Design of an Integrated SITL and HITL Simulation System for the Control of a Loitering Aerial Vehicle

An investigation into the aircraft flight simulation and control system is presented in this paper. The study was firstly focused on the establishment of an integrated hardware-in-the-loop(HITL) platform for aircraft flight simulation based on MATLAB/Simulink+dSPACE. The platform combines the abundant software and hardware resources of dSPACE simulation platform to simulate the flight attitude of an aircraft in six-DOF (degree of freedom) motion. Based on the platform, the study was then focused on the flight numerical simulation by taking a loitering aerial vehicle as an example. An aircraft mathematical model was created for a modular design and off-line numerical simulation based on MATLAB/Simulink. Finally, the study was focused on the control system design of the loitering aerial vehicle and conduct of an HITL simulation experiment for the vehicle pitch control. The experiment verifies the system design and control effectiveness. Research results show that the dSPACE simulation system provides a real time good experimental platform to improve the efficiency of study and development of a flight control system.