Development and Testing of a Simulation Environment for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

This thesis describes the development of a simulation environment for the GeoSurv II Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) developed by the Unmanned Aircraft System Technologies Project. The problem considered in this thesis is that of integrating the existing systems and two new sub-systems developed in this research, into one integrated autonomous simulation environment. The solution for this problem included developing a concept for an autonomous system but more importantly to develop a simulation environment in which the sub-systems can be tested individually or as whole system when required. The framework is also able to produce stereoscopic data that can be used to test various image processing algorithms. Lastly, a communication protocol was developed which bridged the gap between the simulation framework and the real world aircraft test bed.