Building a realistic virtual simulator for unmanned aerial vehicle teleoperation

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) support humans in performing an increasingly varied number of tasks. UAVs need to be remotely operated by a human pilot in many cases. Therefore, pilots require repetitive training to master the UAV movements. Nevertheless, training with an actual UAV involves high costs and risks. Fortunately, simulators are alternatives to face these difficulties. However, existing simulators lack realism, do not present flight information intuitively, and sometimes do not allow natural interaction with the human operator. This work addresses these issues through a framework for building realistic virtual simulators for the human operation of UAVs. First, the UAV is modeled in detail to perform a dynamic simulation in this framework. Then, the information of the above simulation is utilized to manipulate the elements in a virtual 3D operation environment developed in Unity 3D. Therefore, the interaction with the human operator is introduced with a proposed teleoperation algorithm and an input device. Finally, a meta-heuristic optimization procedure provides realism to the simulation. In this procedure, the flight information obtained from an actual UAV is used to optimize the parameters of the teleoperation algorithm. The quadrotor is adopted as the study case to show the proposal’s effectiveness.