AirLoop: A Simulation Framework for Testing of UAV Services Giovagnola, Jessica Moro Megías, Juan B. Molina Fernández, Miguel Pegalajar Cuéllar, Manuel Morales Santos, Diego Pedro Drone simulations Sensor fusion Jetson Nano RADAR simulation HITL SITL This work was supported in part by the European Union (EU)-Funded Project Airborne Data Collection on Resilient System Architectures (ADACORSA) (www.adacorsa.eu) through the Electronic Components and Systems for European Leadership (ECSEL) Joint Undertaking (JU) support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme and Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, Romania, France, Sweden, Cyprus, Greece, Lithuania, Portugal, Italy, Finland, Turkey, under Agreement 876019; in part by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under Project TED2021-129949A-I00; and in part by the Junta de Andalucía under Project P20_00265. Sensor fusion is a critical aspect in autonomous drone navigation as several tasks, such as object detection and self-pose estimation, require combining information from heterogeneous sources. The performance of these solutions depends on several factors, such as the characteristics of the sensors and the environment, as well as the computing platforms, which can heavily impact their accuracy and response time. Carrying out such performance evaluations through real flight tests can be a resource-demanding, time- consuming, and, at times, risky process, which is why researchers often rely on simulation environments for testing and validating sensor fusion algorithms. The simulation environment should provide photorealistic environmental features, as well as a comprehensive set of sensors, in order to allow to test the most extensive set of sensor fusion algorithms. This paper presents AirLoop, an AirSim-based flight simulator for Hardware- in-the-Loop and Software-in-the-Loop algorithm testing and validation. AirLoop extends the sensor setup provided by AirSim with an FMCW RADAR sensor simulation, which has been evaluated based on the Infineon Technologies BGT60TR13C RADAR. Furthermore, this work provides several Software-in-the- Loop (SITL) and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HITL) demonstrations, including interfacing with the Pixhawk 2 flight controller and an extensive evaluation of the communication of the engine with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, which has been evaluated in various use cases, including dataset creation, object detection, Path Planning, and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). 2023-05-09T10:08:39Z 2023-05-09T10:08:39Z 2023-03-13 journal article J. Giovagnola et al. AirLoop: A Simulation Framework for Testing of UAV Services. IEEE Access Volumen 11, 2023 [DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3253788] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/81415 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3253788 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/Research and Innovation Programme 876019 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional IEEE. Instituto de Ingenieros Eléctricos y Electrónicos