ABSTRACT
Development and integration of subsystems on advanced robots, such as unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV), can benefit from the availability of a hardware-in-theloop simulation (HILS) facility. Although complete interoperability of simulated and real subsystems appears desirable, substantial additional complexity of data flows and hardware can be introduced. Where non-real time simulations are involved, methods of synchronising subsystems running at different speeds must be employed. These should take account of the realities of starting and stopping real subsystems. This chapter reviews some of these issues and presents CORESIM-a distributed HILS system based around High Level Architecture (HLA) (DoD, 1998). The system has been used to evaluate a time-slicing synchronisation approach, and to assist in the development of docking, servo control using visual feedback and concurrent mapping and localisation systems for autonomous underwater vehicles.
