Laboratory Test Facility for Simulating a Sense and Avoid Flight System

Within a project funded by the Italian Aerospace Research Centre UAV program, the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Naples is in charge of developing an obstacle detection and tracking system aimed at non-cooperative collision avoidance. In this framework, a flight prototype of an autonomous Detect Sense and Avoid system has been installed onboard a Very Light Aircraft for evaluating performance in flight tests. The system is based on multiple-sensor data integration and it includes several components, such as a Ka-band pulsed radar, four Electro Optical sensors and two processing units. This paper is focused on the description of an indoor facility for hardware-in-the-loop tests which was realized to maximize the outcome of flight tests. It includes processing units dedicated to simulate aircraft and intruder dynamics that are provided as input to sensors. In the developed configuration, the radar is replaced by a simulator while the real visible camera unit is used. Flight images are displayed on a LCD screen. The facility permits to test multiple critical flight configurations and different sensors combinations. Moreover, the availability of a well assessed simulator allows the research team to support several activities such as: i) tuning of the data fusion techniques (i.e. tracking based on Kalman filtering); ii) system performance validation for a wide range of scenarios; iii) evaluation of alternative architectures that are difficult to be reproduced during flights. Some results of hardware-in-the-loop tests based on flight data regarding radar-only tracking and EO detection are presented and analyzed. They are fully compliant with the expected performance.