  This paper presents a system for hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulation of
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control algorithms implemented on a heterogeneous
SoC FPGA computing platforms. The AirSim simulator running on a PC and an Arty
Z7 development board with a Zynq SoC chip from AMD Xilinx were used.
Communication was carried out via a serial USB link. An application for
autonomous landing on a specially marked landing strip was selected as a case
study. A landing site detection algorithm was implemented on the Zynq SoC
platform. This allowed processing a 1280 x 720 @ 60 fps video stream in real
time. Performed tests showed that the system works correctly and there are no
delays that could negatively affect the stability of the control. The proposed
concept is characterised by relative simplicity and low implementation cost. At
the same time, it can be applied to test various types of high-level perception
and control algorithms for UAV implemented on embedded platforms. We provide
the code developed on GitHub, which includes both Python scripts running on the
PC and C code running on Arty Z7.
