Iterative Testing for New Mechatronics Integrations

Scout is not the most beautiful of drones, but he is an important part of our fleet of vehicles. And rarely (but not never), Scout falls out of the sky.  You see, Scout helps us test new mechatronics integrations, and it’s important to have a drone-like Scout to verify software changes to our systems.

Mechatronics integrations are complex, and as the team at Knackforge works to improve and optimize the mapping from software to hardware, we use iterative processes to verify those integrations are working perfectly. We start with software simulators which cycle tirelessly around the clock to test and check the software to see if it will break. This is called Software-In-The-Loop, or SITL. Once an error is found, our Knackforge team will address the issue and plug the new software back into the SITL simulators, where it will cycle again and again, adding up to hundreds upon hundreds of tests and checks. Once the software has been verified, we move on to the next part of our iterative mechatronics integrations, our drone friend Scout. He bravely takes our software out into a hardware world. We load the SITL-verified software onto his single-board computer, give him a pep talk and let him fly. The little drone that could.

Scout the drone 

The integration of software and hardware will sometimes not line up perfectly, because SITL is only a representation of real-world situations but SITL is not the real world in all ways! Once software and hardware meet the real world, our Knackforge team has the opportunity to refine our system even more – finding what needs to be altered, making the change, and adding it back into our mechatronics system, whether that be on the software or the hardware side. We then fly Scout again to verify the changes.

Once the Knackforge team is satisfied with our configuration, it’s time to send the software to the big leagues of hardware – end-user drones. We let Scout rest for a while and set up our mechatronics system on our varsity drones. As of writing this blog, the team here at Knackforge is proud to say we have never had a production-level drone crash because of a mechatronics issue! That is because of the iterative testing system we have in place to verify all of our software and hardware changes on drones like Scout.

We take our mechatronics integrations very seriously. Mobile hardware that is controlled by software is a useful tool for many applications, and the Knackforge team continues to refine, improve and optimize these mechatronic integrations every day.