A concurrent testing process for research unmanned aerial vehicles

For more then a decade the UAV lab at Georgia Tech has been developing technologies for guidance, navigation and control of UAVs. From the early years of flying the Army Autonomous Scout Rotorcraft Testbed (ASRT) to the current Yamaha R-Max unmanned helicopter in multi-UAV flight tests, the UAV lab has gained much experience in flight testing of new technologies, and through this experience has devised procedures and tools to ensure that these flight tests are productive and carried out with stringent safety measures. Specifically, the software tools developed in the lab allow researchers to run software in the loop (SITL) and hardware in the loop (HITL) tests on their work that simulate the actual flight of the vehicle being flown to a very high degree of accuracy. SITL tests are used for initial verification of new algorithms, later HITL tests verify communication and functionality of all hardware components prior to flight. This paper gives an overview of the systems used in the lab and the procedures that lead up to flight testing the algorithms developed.