Simulation-based Testing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Aerialist

Simulation-based testing is crucial for ensuring the safety and reliability of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially as they become more autonomous and get increasingly used in commercial scenarios. The complexity and automated nature of UAVs requires sophisticated simulation environments for effectively testing their safety requirements. The primary challenges in setting up these environments pose significant barriers to the practical, widespread adoption of UAVs. We address this issue by introducing Aerialist (unmanned AERIAL vehIcle teST bench), a novel UAV test bench, built on top of PX4 firmware, that facilitates or automates all the necessary steps of definition, generation, execution, and analysis of system-level UAV test cases in simulation environments. Moreover, it also supports parallel and scalable execution and analysis of test cases on Kubernetes clusters. This makes Aerialist a unique platform for research and development of test generation approaches for UAVs. To evaluate Aerialist's support for UAV developers in defining, generating, and executing UAV test cases, we implemented a search-based approach for generating realistic simulation-based test cases using real-world UAV flight logs. We confirmed its effectiveness in improving the realism and representativeness of simulation-based UAV tests.