Simulating Missions of a UAV with a Communications Payload

In 1996 Pinkney et. al. proposed that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) could be used as military communications relays to supplement the capabilities offered by satellites. A recent study sponsored by the European Commission predicted a gradual increase of UAV in civilian applications for the period to 2020, including broadcast and communications services. Such UAVs could find roles providing communications in disasters and major events, or in any activity where quick response and short term area communications are required. Typical systems could comprise one or more UAVs and a number of mobile ground nodes that require interconnection. This simulation environment has been developed to test these ideas. Its main purpose has been to provide a testbed for potential navigation algorithms, written in MATLAB, in an environment that could simulate the movement of the UAV, mobiles, and the communications links. A suitable environment was developed using Systems Toolkit (STK) and MATLAB. This simulation environment has been in use for two years and has provided a flexible testbed for assessing operating concepts and UAV path planning algorithms. This paper outlines the requirements of this simulation environment and describes how it was implemented. It then describes the models used for each of the objects and, where appropriate, states the key equations used in each model.