Unified Co-Simulation Framework for Autonomous UAVs.

Autonomous drones (UAVs) have rapidly grown in popularity due to their form factor, agility, and ability to operate in harsh or hostile environments. Drone systems come in various form factors and configurations and operate under tight physical parameters. Further, it has been a significant challenge for architects and researchers to develop optimal drone designs as open-source simulation frameworks either lack the necessary capabilities to simulate a full drone flight stack or they are extremely tedious to setup with little or no maintenance or support. In this paper, we develop and present UniUAVSim, our fully open-source co-simulation framework capable of running software-in-the-loop (SITL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) simulations concurrently. The paper also provides insights into the abstraction of a drone flight stack and details how these abstractions aid in creating a simulation framework which can accurately provide an optimal drone design given physical parameters and constraints. The framework was validated with real-world hardware and is available to the research community to aid in future architecture research for autonomous systems.