A simulator environment for aerial service robot prototypes

This paper provides an architectural description from the software point of view of the simulator environment developed for the AIRobots project. The scope of the project is the realization of an aerial service robotic prototype, a sort of robotic hand to be employed in inspection-by-contact tasks. The simulator is then crucial in both the training of the human operator, and as a support tool for the development and validation of low- and high-level control algorithms. The tasks that can be performed are not limited to free-flight missions, but include also to the cases in which the robot has to actively interact with the environment. The simulator relies on Simulink and Blender, and has been designed with a modular structure that makes software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop simulations possible by simply replacing the different control modules with the real controllers on the prototypes.