Photorealistic simulation platform for autonomous landing of fixed-wing aircraft

To investigate the vision-based autonomous landing of fixed-wing aircraft, we propose a photorealistic simulation platform that leverages ROS, Unreal Engine, and Pixhawk 4. This platform adopts a software-in-the-loop model consisting of rendering, control, communication, and sensor modules. To achieve realistic rendering control, the seawater hydrodynamics and fixed-wing aircraft dynamics are modeled. Based on the platform, we create simulation scenarios under different weather and disturbance conditions for autonomous landing of the aircraft carrier. The platform solves the problem that datasets of related scenes are difficult to collect and experiments are difficult to carry out. To verify the developability of the platform, we design and implement a runway line feature point extraction method (vision-based pose estimation algorithm), and evaluate the performance of the method under various conditions. Experiments show that our software-in-the-loop platform enables vision-based algorithm verification and supports simulation research for the autonomous landing of fixed-wing aircraft.