High fidelity hardware-in-the-loop simulation development for an autonomous underwater vehicle

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have many, scientific, military, and commercial applications because of their potential capabilities and significant cost-performance improvements. Typical AUV development requires critical system design and many costly at-sea trials during which systems specifications can be validated. Modeling and simulation provides a cost-effective method for carrying out preliminary component or system (hardware and software) testing and verification. Due to the complexity of most AUV development and their tight schedules, the simulated systems often differ considerably from the actual embedded architecture, thereby reducing the fidelity of the entire simulation. We adopted a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation approach that includes some level of the system's hardware and software. As expected, an HIL simulation requires all components be run under hard real-time constraint. The paper presents our implementation and considerations on HIL simulation for single and multiple vehicles. A brief mention of sensor and environment modeling is also provided.