automated helicopter simulation with FMS ?

[Kif]

Hi,
I am studying in the engineer school of Geneva and I have the following semester project :

I have to build a kind of autopilot for an helicopter, and for that I first need a way to test my algorithms on a simulator. I was wondering if it is possible to use FMS as a simulator. what I need is to be able to send data(axescommands) to FMS from Matlab, and to recieve information(gyro orientation, position, ...) back to apply corrections in the commands. is that possible with FMS ?

Thanks

Daniel - kif@davo.ch

[bardiche]

I 2nd that...

Probably the shortest path in terms of development time by Michael and the FMS team would be to make a FMS State Server which would dump out positions,velocities and orientations of the model to a specified port or something.

Once the server is in place, this would allow students (like Daniel and I) to write software for our specific application which would listen to the FMS State Server, use whatever mathmatical package we have at our disposal to calculate desired control inputs, and then output control inputs to any one of the appropriate ports from which FMS can recieve controller inputs.

I believe that this scheme will work, will be fairly easy to implement by the FMS programming team and is general enough to allow for multiple applications since some students may want to use MatLAB while others may want to use their own custom software.

-james

PS. I just started using FMS for learning how to fly (or more importantly how not crash) helis, so thankyou!

[pepgma]

yeah, one vote more for an open interface. Also for controlling and setting postion, angles, etc. Will help a lot of people (liek me) with ongoing research projects (like UAV's) with simulation.

Great Sim by the way.

[arnolde]

I would also strongly encourage such an interface, I would also like to experiment with a helicopter autopilot here in Germany. I would even be prepared to make a donation to raise the motivation

ethan@arnold.net

[apitman]

I add my vote as well. What I would like to do is actually create a multi-user server that could hook multiple computers together. Multi-user FMS....

[arnolde]

Well since no-one ever answers these requests, there are other Sims out there, some even open source, so have a look...

[cuhk]

support, I think the editor should develop a FMS server, with the standard Protocol ,so we can make the client to check our Algorithms

But I see now is 21/10/2006 and I can not find the server,~

[Neil_J]

One more vote for an FMS server. I am working on a helicopter autopilot project and this would really speed it up. I would certainly donate to the developers if it were added. A UDP datagram interface would be best (TCP could also work), with time/XYZ/accelleration/rotational data being put out at a 10-50 ms rate. I wouldn't mind using the serial port joystick protocol to command the aircraft around, as servo PWM is what many people use anyway.