Korean Air developed its new UAV flight control software using Model-Based Design.
In the early phases of development, the engineers developed a Simulink® model to refine and validate high-level requirements.
The engineers developed a dynamic model of the UAV, including landing gear dynamics for simulating automated take-off and landing, with Aerospace Blockset™. Later they used System Identification Toolbox™ to estimate model parameters for flight dynamics and performance verification.
The team designed flight control laws using Robust Control Toolbox™ and Control System Toolbox™ to compute optimal control gains.
The flight management and control system, including the automatic landing guidance subsystem, was modeled in Simulink and Stateflow®.
After running desktop simulations to verify the flight control laws and collect control response data, they analyzed the results, and later, flight test results, in MATLAB®.
Using Simulink Check™ and Simulink Coverage™, the engineers performed regular checks to ensure the model complied with the company’s modeling standards (based on MAAB guidelines) and to measure 100% MC/DC model coverage for their test suite.
The team generated more than 45,000 source lines of code from their models with Embedded Coder®. They integrated this C code with code they had handwritten for hardware drivers, and they reused test cases for model coverage to measure 100% MC/DC code coverage.
Using Polyspace Code Prover™, the team checked all the code for run-time errors, identifying several in the handwritten code that they subsequently corrected. No run-time errors were found in the generated code.
The team conducted real-time HIL simulations with Simulink Real-Time™. The HIL model, which contains more than 11,000 blocks in the flight control and flight dynamics submodels, was reused to create an operator training simulator for the UAV.
Korean Air engineers provided certification authorities with MC/DC coverage reports generated by Simulink Check and Simulink Coverage and testing reports generated by Polyspace Code Prover.
Korean Air completed development on schedule, and the UAV has received airworthiness certification from the Korean government.