Jeff McBride wrote:
I was thinking something like my UAV could be sitting on the ground, but using FG to provide feedback, could think that it is flying. That way we can do a full system test without taking off.
For what it's worth, I saw a demo at Lockheed-Martin where they used the same basic approach to develop a test bed for their control algorithms. This way they can put their actual control hardware in the loop, rather than just a simulation of their control hardware. They used, errr, X-Plane, and couldn't stop gushing about how accurate the flight model was. But I got a chance to fly it, and was not nearly as impressed as they wanted me to be. Their model had huge amounts of adverse yaw ... small amounts of banking would result in 10-15-20 degrees of yaw with resulting dutch roll. In my attempt to land, I had the throttle pulled back to idle, and ran the entire length of a 5000' runway at about 10' AGL doing about 45 kts. without bleeding off any speed (while they insisted I was going to have to slow down if I wanted to land the thing.) Finally at the end of the runway I planted the wheels just to see what would happen. I bounced right back up to about 10' AGL but was now doing 56 kts. and accelerating ... all with the throttle idle. Either they were generating a lot of extra thrust at idle, or X-Plane was creating energy from nothing, or I want their design for my round-the-world attempt. I'm not saying the FG dyanmics models will do any better at R/C model scales ... I don't know if anyone has tried yet (?) I should also point out that the Lockheed-Martin guys had many successful real flights with their various UAV models so even with a slightly questionable flight dynamics model, they still were able to achieve pretty impressive real world results.
Although, I also plan to do as you say and pass on the data from the plane to FG for visualization while it is flying or for mission replay. I'm not sure if this will provide any real usefulness, but I'm pretty sure it will look cool.
I think there are a lot of interesting things you could do with this capability. If you are operating in a known environment, you could add important objects to the FG world so you could see/avoid them. You could play around with remote piloting your vehicle based on a synthetic view. I know someone was working on integrating a live video feed into FG so you would have live video + a larger surrounding synthetic context. Also I think that seeing your flight from a pilot's perspective or a virutal chase plane view will give you different (useful) information that you wouldn't get just from observing the aircraft from the ground in real life.
Keep us posted!
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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