Jeff McBride wrote:
I am looking into the possibility of using FlightGear as a simulator to test flight control software that I am developing for a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) project. The idea is that I will take control values (ailerons, throttle, etc) from the telemetry link and pass them to FG, then take the resulting location, speed, etc. from FG and pass it back to the UAV as if it were coming from the on-board GPS.
From what I can tell, FG has support for this kind of thing, but no documentation of it. So, my question for the experts is what is the best way to do this? I was going to try to use the "generic" network interface, but as far as I can tell it doesn't support a bi-directional link. Perhaps I can run two of these (one in, one out), but is there a better way I should be looking at? There seem to be a lot of options.
Of course, my next problem will be creating a model of the plane I am flying, but I am waiting until I get there to tackle that one.
Have a look at docs-mini/README.IO for starters. You can pass control inputs into FlightGear by creating an FGNetCTRLS (src/Network/net_ctrls.hxx) packet and sending it over to FlightGear. You can then have FlightGear send back an FGNetFDM packet (src/Network/net_fdm.hxx) which will include all the position, velocity, orientation type data. Yes, you'll eventually have to create a model of your airplane, but you can certainly iron out all the interface issues while using an existing aircraft model. I don't know how well our FDM engines scale to R/C or UAV scales, but I'd think with some fiddling around you could get something to work. I'm an R/C pilot myself, and involved in a UAV project here at the University of Minnesota, so I'll be interested to hear what you come up with.
Regards,
Curt.
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Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org
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