Evolving Controllers for UAVs With Matlab

I wrote quite a lot about the simulated drone flying championship. You can read a small introduction about the championship here. A succinct explanation of the simulated drone flying championship is here. Moreover, this tutorial explains how to evolve controllers for the simulated drones.

I have also been writing statements for a few interesting projects for simulated drones, that could be taken up as FYPs at the undergraduate level. For a more detailed review of these projects, please review them on the following links:

These are all nice projects. An aspect worth noticing about all of these is that they involve UAV Playground. UAV Playground is a UAV simulator that runs in conjunction with the FlightGear simulator and Google Earth. The reason I chose it was that it is written in Java, and I wanted to port it to Matlab somehow. These projects are nice and are worth pursuing.

However, here I want to introduce a very project that can be accomplished solely with Matlab, with minimal involvement, whatsoever, with another, or any other, programming language, whatsoever. The reason for this digression for this has a basis in my recent discovery of Flight Simulator Interface for Matlab. With this tool, you can run FlightGear simulator with Simulink models. Have I introduced FlightGear to you in this tutorial? I must have done that elsewhere, of course! Stated shortly, FlightGear is an open source flight simulator, that is possibly also the best in its niche domain. With this interface, you can run FlightGear models through Matlab and/or Simulink. This should lead to a lot of time-saving for you if you want to work with flight simulators or development of UAVs. So following are the things that I expect you to do in this tutorial.

Download and install FlightGear on your machine, by following the guidelines on this Matlab page.
Run FlightGear with Simulink models and see how you can gain experience with using FlightGear through Matlab.
Browse and look for the machine learning models that you have available for Matlab.
Try to figure out a way that how you can integrate these, or similar, algorithms with the flight simulation interface.

You will find the following articles particularly useful for this project.

A Survey of Free Software for the Design, Analysis, Modelling, and Simulation of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

The objective of this paper is to analyze free software for the design, analysis, modelling, and simulation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Free software is the best choice when the reduction of

Automatic control education using Flight Gear and MATLAB based virtual lab

In this paper, a virtual lab based on MATLAB and FlightGear flight simulator is discussed and developed. The virtual lab consists of number of experiments that enhances the understanding of fundamental concepts of classical control for undergraduate students.

An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

In general, only the information that you provide, or the choices you make while visiting a web site, can be stored in a cookie. For example, the site cannot determine your email name unless you choose to type it.

NASA HL-20 with Optional FlightGear Interface – MATLAB & Simulink Example

This model shows how to model NASA’s HL-20 lifting body modeled with Simulink®, Stateflow® and Aerospace Blockset™ software.

FlightGear Route Manager – File Exchange – MATLAB Central

File exchange, MATLAB Answers, newsgroup access, Links, and Blogs for the MATLAB & Simulink user community

UAV Simulation Environment for Autonomous Flight Control Algorithms – ProQuest

This thesis presents the development of a UAV simulation environment for the design, analysis, and comparison of autonomous flight control laws. The simulation environment was developed in MATLAB/Simulink, with custom map generation software and FlightGear 3-D visualization. Graphical user interface of the simulation environment is user-friendly and all available options are discussed in detail.

Co-Simulation of Matlab and FlightGear for Identification and Control of Aircraft

The paper outlines the development of a co-simulation solution of Matlab and Flight- Gear in which the communication between these programs is done via UDP without needing further toolsets. The simulation and rendering is done by FlightGear. Flight measurement signals are sent to Matlab, which in turn sends back actuator input values computed by a flight control system.

Howto:Design an autopilot – FlightGear wiki

Why not make things slightly easier, before we start working on the autopilot? Since we will be updating the autopilot hundreds of times, making tiny adjustments each time, we don’t want to reload FlightGear every time. Therefore, we assign an “reload autopilot configuration” action to a key on our keyboard.