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Nowadays, flight simulation is not only employed for education or training purposes, it also has some significant relevance regarding the research and development in the area of aerospace systems. The simulated flight scenarios range from training of standard situations for prospective pilots to extreme maneuvers and ways to deal with hazardous flight regimes. In research and development, simulation enables efficient testing of new systems and algorithms. The main motivation conists in an enhanced flexibility and security, next to a reduction of overall costs. The avoidance of real flight experiments entails a reduced environmental pollution and energy consumption.
At present, several large scale simulators are being developed in cooperation with the Institute of flight system technology of the DLR. One of them will be equipped with a 6-degree-of-freedom motion platform and enables the simulator’s user to directly experience the forces acting on the aircraft. In near future, the ILR will operate its own, rigidly mounted simulator which is based on a real cockpit of a Dornier 728 aircraft. Powerful computers generate a panoramic view of a synthesized environment and calculate the aircraft’s motion with high precision with respect to the complex aerodynamic relationships. Detailed terrain models and high resolution computer graphics result in a high degree of realism.
The research concentrates on the investigation of novel, hybrid aircraft control algorithms as well as validation of pilot models that are based on artificial neural networks. It is the main goal to improve security during aircraft operation. An important aspect is the adequate reaction of the autopilot on occurring reconfigurations of the aircraft, for example in case of a rudder actuator’s malfunction.
Another important focus of research lies in the simulation of autonomous micro aerial vehicles. The models created at the institute enable efficient numerical evaluations of new control schemes and estimation methodologies. In the near future, the transition to real experiments will be alleviated by a hardware-in-the-loop system incorporating the MINC autopilot.
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