Prototypical digital twin of multi-rotor UAV control and trajectory following

This paper presents the development of a prototypical digital twin package for multi-rotor aerial vehicle(MAV) systems, with potential application for monitoring a construction site. The focus is how to create a virtual representation of an actual surveillance system that can be updated from real-time data to effectively help with its control, conditional monitoring, and decision-making via a versatile platform. Here, a simulation framework is developed to include the system dynamics, operation environment, and other control and tracking requirements for a wide range of MAV mission circumstances. Real-world examples from a construction site are used to illustrate the concept. A prominent advantage is that we can thoroughly test, validate, verify and evaluate the MAV control and monitoring in abnormal conditions without the need for physical implementation and field experiments for the whole system in reality. This will substantially reduce extensive testing efforts throughout the development cycle to achieve optimal performance in terms of cooperation, safety, smoothness, fault tolerance, and energy efficiency.