FURI | Spring 2022

Virtual Testing Environment for Flexible Drone Flight Simulation and Design Analysis

The use of flexible drones has increased in recent years and testing these designs takes time and effort, because virtual testing environments are rarely available. This project aims to make a high-fidelity simulation to run virtual tests on one such flexible drone: SQUEEZE. Physics-based simulators can test both its hardware utility and flight control software for hardware-in-the-loop and software-in-the-loop (HITL/SITL) before deploying it for real flights. This overcomes two disadvantages of real-life testing: avoiding crashes that result in broken parts, and time spent resetting/repairing testing environments.