Simulation-based testing of unmanned aerial vehicles with AERIALIST
Additional information
Authors
MazraehKhatiri S.,
Panichella S.,
Tonella P.
Type
Article in conference proceedings
Year
2024
Language
English
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Software and its engineering, Software verification and validation, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Test generation, Simulation
Conference proceedings
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE Companion)
Meeting name
ICSE-Companion '24: 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings
Meeting place
Lisbon Portugal
Meeting date
April 14-20, 2024
Pages (or article number)
134 - 138
Volume
46
Diffusion
License
CC BY
Visibility
Public
Status open access
Hybrid
