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Flightgear telemetry app

Posted by Luke on February 2, 2008 at 6:53pm
I have read about Curtis Olson's use of flightgear for UAV development, but didn't see any applications to download to get started working on an autopilot with. So I've started on my own:

http://code.google.com/p/binarymillenium/wiki/FlightGear

There's not much to it currently, it just demonstrates that I can receive vehicle state information through the native-fdm udp interface.
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Comments

  • Marcus Wolschon February 6, 2008 at 2:20am
    Cool, thanks for the code!
    I'll try to use it to generate IR-sensor-readings for attitude-control and
    and parse servo-data in return.
    (Maybe make a script that used gpio-in and d2a + serial(for gps) to hook
    it up physically to an autopilot.)
  • Luke February 3, 2008 at 12:08am
    Sure- flightgear has an interface that allows sending and receiving of the state of the vehicle being simulated (the FGNetFDM structure) and the position of control surfaces and other things (the FGNetCtrls structure).

    What I do is have flightgear send my c++ application both, then modify the contents of the controls structure with new aileron/elevator/rudder positions and send the modified structure back to flightgear.

    The fdm structure contains the position and attitude of the vehicle, so using my application one could code up an autopilot that looks at vehicle state and alters the control surfaces in response.

    I'm working in Linux right now with flightgear 1.0, my software would probably compile under Windows in Cygwin but I haven't yet tried that.
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson February 2, 2008 at 7:03pm
    Luke, for us newbies, can you explain what that code is? What OS is it for? What language is it in? What does it take to run it?

    Just a little context for the non-coders would be great.
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