Development of Simulation Technologies for Assessing Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Performance in Precision Agriculture Operations

The adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in agricultural scenarios can aspire to become a reality if the validation of their effectiveness will be sustained by the contemporary and shared improvement of all those technological gaps identified by current research projects. In particular, a commercial quadrotor-based spraying system that will have to fly automatically between vineyard rows would need to implement sophisticated flight control algorithms that could imply a great amount of computational workload just to keep attitude and position under control while following the flight path. This kind of trajectories are often characterized by steep slopes, limited room for manoeuvring and sharp turns. At the same time, the control algorithm should be flexible enough to deal with rapid changes in the reference signal due to collision avoidance alerts, wind disturbances and spraying reaction effects. Moreover, the field of agriculture needs robust machines that can operate at a wide air temperature range, into various conditions of sunshine and with the necessity of easy use and maintenance. In addition, the cost of the development and the production of the system have to be kept as low as possible to comply with the market rules. This Master's degree thesis aims at exploring the potentialities of the selected commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) autopilot board, the Pixhwak 4, for the implementation and testing of advanced control algorithms, in particular with Processor-In-the-Loop (PIL) trials with the automatic generated code running on the microcontroller while the modeling environment, developed in MATLAB/Simulink, is running on a generic computer. In addition, a second objective of this work is to derive virtual 3D scenarios from laser, detection & ranging (LIDAR) point cloud maps realized by survey campaigns on the actual location selected for the flight testing operations: these scenarios have the twofold objective to be a useful tool for generating feasible trajectories and for visualizing the flight simulation of the UAV.