Rapid Control Prototyping and PIL Co-Simulation of a Quadrotor UAV Based on NI myRIO-1900 Board

In this paper, a new Computer Aided Design (CAD) methodology for the Processor-In-the-Loop (PIL) cosimulation and Rapid Control Prototyping (RCP) of a Quadrotor Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) type of Unmanned Arial Vehicle (UAV) is proposed and successfully implemented around an embedded NI myRIO-1900 target and a host PC. The developed software (SW) and hardware (HW) prototyping platform is based on the Control Design and Simulation (CDSim) module of LabVIEW environment and an established Network Streams data communication protocol. A dynamical model of the Quadrotor UAV, which incorporates the dynamics of vertical and landing flights and aerodynamic forces, is obtained using the Newton-Euler formalism. PID and Model Predictive Control (MPC) approaches are chosen as examples for experiment prototyping. These control laws, as well as the dynamical model of the Quad, are implemented and deployed as separate LabVIEW Virtual Instruments (VI) on the myRIO-1900 target and the host PC, respectively. Several demonstrative cosimulation results, obtained for a 3D LabVIEW emulator of the Quadrotor, are presented and discussed in order to improve the effectiveness of the proposed Model Based Design (MBD) prototyping methodology Keywords—Quadrotor UAV; modeling; Computer Aided Design; Model Based Design; Rapid Control Prototyping; PIL cosimulation; LabVIEW/CDSim; NI myRIO-1900; PID and MPC approaches