Real time flight data

[mamoukoy]

Hello,
I would like to know if it is possible to get flight data in real time and to send them to another program (home made) for some calculation and display of computed parameters. The flight data I'm speaking about are at least:
- Euler angles: pitch, roll and yaw
- Magnetic heading
- Altitude from the ground and absolute altitude
- 3D positions of the model in the scene (vertical and horizontal axis)
- 3D speed in the ground frame of reference
- 3D acceleration in the model frame of reference
I'm speaking about a AHRS.

Moreover, when I speek about real time, the idea is to have sufficient information per second during the simulation to make some calculation and displays whith good accuracy.

My objective is to display on another screen something that looks like an attitude indicator of a plane.

Thank you very much in avance for your answer

Mamoukoy

[Torsten Hans]

Hello Mamoukoy,

currently this is not possible. We might plan this feature for AeroFly 5, but we are currently busy with other stuff.

[mamoukoy]

Hello,
do you have some news regarding flight data?

[IPACS Support]

Sorry, we have not implemented this feature yet. The number of people requesting this feature is still too low too justify an implementation.

[Jürgen N.]

Fully AK!
Please use your precious time to push AF 5.5.....
Many thanks advanced
Jürgen

[Chris_Pitts]

The number of people requesting this feature is still too low too justify an implementation.

Greetings,

I'm a controls engineering student, and a researcher at a major university research laboratory studying integration of unmanned systems. If I may share some of my own experience, perhaps it will help you and your company in evaluating this proposal in the presence of all relevant and actionable information.

Recently, there has been a dramatic expansion in the capabilities of R/C hobbyists, University researchers, and commercial enterprises in the ability to integrate and fly unmanned drones. RC aircraft have become a very popular platform for creating these autonomous vehicles. This is creating a fresh opportunity for the consumer RC simulator market to expand.

One of the primary challenges for system integration using R/C aircraft is in testing the controllers with the aircraft. R/C aircraft capable of carrying the necessary electronics for unmanned flight can be quite expensive, and crashes in testing can become costly for integrators. The primary solution to this problem has generally been to use a technique known as Hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) Simulation. In HiL, the physical electronics hardware, and in particular, the controller algorithms used in that hardware, can be tested using simulation software.

Essentially, simulation software is needed for unmanned systems for the same reasons that your software is so highly prized by hobbyists: you can train and learn without the consequences of failure. For anyone who has tried to build a new unmanned air vehicle from the ground up, quality HiL has often been the difference between success and failure.

The primary reason for the recent expansion of the MicroUAV market comes from very recent successes in the open-source community in creating viable ground station software within only the last few months. The primary example of this software, called ArduPilot, comes complete with flight planning and real-time control capabilities. For your reference, here is a link to their site:

http://diydrones.com/notes/ArduPilot

In fact, ArduPilot even includes HiL simulation capabilities using two of your market competitors, X-Plane and FlightGear. The Mission Planner Software has been downloaded over 7,000 times by users, many of whom go on to purchase X-Plane seperately, because it's the best simulation currently available for many of the models.

There's just one problem, and this problem is the reason for my appeal on this forum: X-Plane is an awful simulator for R/C. Traditional R/C helicopters aren't supported at all at this time, and ArduCopter generally does all of the physics simulation its self using extremely oversimplified models for the platforms it does support in HiL. What we most desperately need is a high-quality simulation solution specifically tailored for use with R/C platforms. This is where we need you.

If AeroFly should be the first to solve this problem for the research, consumer, and hobbyist markets, I have no doubt that at the very least, every university with an engineering department would be a potential customer. This says nothing of the gains you would make in your current hobbyist market and the commercial sector.



Here's some additional information for your engineers. They probably already know most of this, but I'll list it for your convenience, should you decide to take a closer look at what it will take to add this capability to AeroFly.

Your software already takes in PPM data from your controller and converts it to USB. The electronics package for the ArduPilot works well enough within this dynamic, that it might not even be necessary to modify AeroFly to accept the ArduPilot's data stream as an input. If modifications are needed at all, they can be made by the open-source community to adapt the data stream to suit yours. All that would be needed for this would be an SDK that describes your communications protocol.

If you'd rather not share that protocol, then your software team could easily create a second protocol for generic use and distribution. Either of these solutions will allow your software to integrate with any open-source or closed-source autopilot solution, potentially opening your software up to the military marketplace as well.

The other addition needed is for the software to have the capability of outputting a data stream containing the vehicle's real-time telemmetry data such as Euler angles, position, velocity, etc.. For reference, X-Plane's interface includes the capability to export a wide variety of real-time telemetry streams. If it was me coding it, I'd use them as a model. They use easy, standard communications protocols that can interface with just about any software out there.

Thanks for listening. I hope this gives you enough information to facilitate your decision making process. If you have any additional questions, Please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

-Christopher Pitts
christopher.pitts@ieee.org

[IPACS Support]

Hello Mr. Pitts, could you please get in direct contact with us regarding this issue and send us an email to mail (at) ipacs.de.