Piccolo system user guide - Unmanned Aircraft & Drones

Clo ud Cap
Technology
PO Box 1500, No. 8 Fourth St, Hood River, OR 97031, ph 541 387 2120, fax 541 387 2030
5 Development environment
The development environment is the set of tools that allows the vehicle designer to configure the
avionics and software to accommodate the specific application. The tools that make up the
development environment include:
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Avionics hardware, with built-in debugging and communication resources.
Software compiler/debugger and driver source code.
Control systems design and analysis tools.
Auto-code generation tools for control systems and state machines.
Aircraft simulation model.
Hardware in loop simulation tools.
While there are many small avionics systems available, few provide all the tools listed above.
Piccolo is novel in part because the development environment was designed in from the
beginning.
5.1 Software environment
Piccolo includes built-in software that will be suitable for many applications, however for those
applications that require fine control over the software, the software source code for the entire
Piccolo system can be licensed.
5.2 Design environment
In recent years new design tools for control systems have come to maturity. The popular Matlab
environment with its controls simulation package Simulink, has been augmented by the addition
of autocode tools Real-Time-Workshop (RTW) and Stateflow. Using these tools control system
designers can graphically model physical plants and design control laws and state machines. The
resulting designs can then be automatically coded in C using RTW, compiled using the software
environment, and downloaded to the target system. Piccolo has more than enough CPU muscle
to run complicated autocoded algorithms. Indeed the basic control software that comes with
Piccolo was designed in exactly this fashion, and Cloud Cap has made the design available to
developers.
5.3 Hardware in loop simulation
Hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation is a cornerstone of unmanned aircraft development. Well
designed simulators allow the aircraft control laws and mission functionality to be tested without
risking hardware in flight test. Although HIL simulation can not replace flight testing, it
measurably reduces the likelihood of failure by detecting bugs and deficiencies in the lab.
To facilitate this vital (and typically difficult) function the Piccolo developers kit includes a
hardware in the loop simulator that can be used to test the performance of a Piccolo
implementation. The HIL simulator is based upon the external CAN interface. When in
simulation mode Piccolo sends control surface signals and receives sensor inputs from the CAN
interface. A PC with a CAN interface card running the HIL simulation software completes the
necessary hardware. See the documents “Hardware in the Loop simulator for the Piccolo
Avionics” and the “Piccolo Quick Setup Guide” for more details on how to use the simulator.
Piccolo User’s Guide Page 33