Today's aerial robots are being tasked to fly in near-Earth environments such as caves, forests and buildings. The lack of flight data and performance metrics poses a gap that prevents the analytical design of such robots. This paper describes a test rig with a full-scale diorama in its workspace. Lamps, fans, and generators allow the control of lighting, gust and obscurants to emulate conditions found in near-Earth environments. The rig's motions resemble the actual robotic aircraft through model reference adaptive control; sensor data feed into a high-fidelity math model of the aircraft's dynamics to generate rig motion response

Fully autonomous aerial robots are needed to accomplish near-Earth missions such as search and rescue, and bio-chemical sensing. Recent advances in sensor technologies urge the aerial robotics community towards full autonomy. Only then, the sensors that are needed to detect obstacles will become more accurate, reliable, and smaller. The lack of flight test data in near-Earth environments poses a gap in the modeling and integration of obstacle detection sensors. To help advance the aerial robotics field we designed a hardware-in-the-loop system for near-Earth flying robots. The hardware-in-the-loop system generates the motion of the actual robotic aircraft in near-Earth environment by implementing model reference adaptive control (MRAC). The high-fidelity math model of the robotic aircraft is the reference model of the MRAC. The controller structure of the system is explained in this paper