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Scientific use - external simulations
Most modules can be substituted by external simulations
- Internal sim properties accessible over the network
- The entire FDM can be delegated to a remote computer
Two papers at the European Space Agency ASTRA 2002
- Both can be found at http://www.flightgear.org/docs.html
- Both projects used FlightGear as their research frame work
Navigation of autonomous vehicles on foreign planets using terrain recognition
Development of a fuzzy autopilot for autonomous flying vehicles operating in the Mars atmosphere
Smart icing systems research using adaptive FDMs
Remote user interface for an unmanned aerial vehicle
Notes:
In addition to entertainment, simulation is often used for education and training. The purpose of training is to improve the performance of the “pilot module” whereas the purpose of scientific simulation is to improve one of the other modules – such as the autopilot, flight model, etc.
The uses above are developing/improving modules for navigation, autopilot, checklist and instrument panel. Scientific work on flight data models tends to be scripted so JSBSim for example would run independently of FlightGear. Since JSBSim can run as a FlightGear module as well as a standalone program, the aircraft models that result from the simulation can subsequently be immersively flown by pilots for a qualitative evaluation.