UAS Simulator for Modeling, Analysis and Control in Free Flight and Physical Interaction

This paper presents the ARCAD simulator for the rapid development of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), including underactuated and fully-actuated multirotors, fixed-wing aircraft, and Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) hybrid vehicles. The simulator is designed to accelerate these aircraft’s modeling and control design. It provides various analyses of the design and operation, such as wrench-set computation, controller response, and flight optimization. In addition to simulating free flight, it can simulate the physical interaction of the aircraft with its environment. The simulator is written in MATLAB to allow rapid prototyping and is capable of generating graphical visualization of the aircraft and the environment in addition to generating the desired plots. It has been used to develop several real-world multirotor and VTOL applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/keipour/aircraftsimulator-matlab.