  Control systems on unmanned vehicles are safety-critical systems whose
requirements on reliability and safety are ever-increasing. Currently, testing
a complex autonomous control system is an expensive and time-consuming process,
which requires massive repeated experimental testing during the whole
development stage. This paper presents a unified simulation and test platform
for vehicle autonomous control systems aiming to significantly improve the
development speed and safety level of unmanned vehicles. First, a unified
modular modeling framework compatible with different types of vehicles is
proposed with methods to ensure modeling credibility. Then, the simulation
software system is developed by the model-based design framework, whose modular
programming methods and automatic code generation functions ensure the
efficiency, credibility, and standardization of the system development process.
Finally, an FPGA-based real-time hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform is
proposed to ensure the comprehensiveness and credibility of the simulation and
test results. In the end, the proposed platform is applied to a multicopter
control system. By comparing with experimental results, the accuracy and
credibility of the simulation testing results are verified by using the
simulation credibility assessment method proposed in our previous work. To
verify the practicability of the proposed platform, several successful
applications are presented for the multicopter rapid prototyping, estimation
algorithm verification, autonomous flight testing, and automatic safety testing
with automatic fault injection and result evaluation of unmanned vehicles.
