Hello, It's been a long time since i've posted here!
I'm currently employed in a small company here in Portugal (http://www.albatroz-eng.com/). Our main products in a system that inspects powerlines from helicopters. This year we are going to a big exhibition and i've suggested that it would be interesting to have a simulator (only because we would have a hard time flying the helicopter inside the building ;) ). Our solution is basically comprised of a LiDAR, an INS/GPS unit and camera(s). Simulating INS/GPS is easy because all the data is in the FG tree AFAIK. Camera(s) can be linked instances of FG with the views properly set (perhaps captured with image server). LiDAR is the only part the gets tricky. Our LiDAR is placed pointing to the side and down of the aircraft. It's a 2D LiDAR that captures "slices" of the powerline and as the helicopter flies forward we get all the line (like this: http://www.albatroz-eng.com/solutions/plmi/lidar_ohl_example.PNG). My ideia is to have an instance of FG with the camera pointed as if it was the LiDAR and then capture a column of the Z-buffer. From what i understand FG has depth partitioning. I'm guessing we don't want this active for this application. Is this correct? Is there any "switch" for this or will i need to dive into the code? The LiDAR has about 150m of useful range. Is there any "recommended" method of getting the values from the z-buffer? From what i hear some methods have very low performance. Has anyone tinkered with this? For the scenery we would need a powerline with believable trees, shrubs and houses below and nearby (and they obviously can't be done with some trick that results in no z-buffer entry). The scenery doesn't need to match real world locations of powerlines. Do we have any part of the scenery that is suited for this? Last time i've seen we have towers but no cables between them. Is this still true? How should we go about solving this? I'm guessing i could make the powerline as an extremely big model but if it can be done with code i think we would be better served (and it would be a nice addition to FG) If we could crash into the powerlines it would be a good feature but it's not required As for helicopters, is anyone working on a EC350, EC120 or Bell 206? These are the types we have used and so would prefer to have in the sim but it's just a minor detail. Thanks! Cheers, Tiago ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
