An Integrated, Modular Simulation System for Education ... - Cal Poly

along with the fundamentals in FBW flight control systems. This combination ofdisciplines must be tied together with hands-on experience working with control systemsdynamics. Demonstrating the resulting handling qualities to engineering students of theirdesigns of Fly By Wire flight control systems has been nearly impossible due to thehigh cost of computer hardware and the long time required for skilled engineers toprogram the source code for the simulation and the control laws. Frequency domainanalysis provides little intuitive basis for the student. The hands-on learning that spawnsmental connections between modal analysis and the time domain is best demonstrated bypilot-in-the-loop simulation [Ref. 9]. Simulink/RTW provides a means to create a pilot inthe loop simulation. Seeing coupled responses such as a Dutch roll mode allowscorrelation of magnitudes of the motion with the position and rate graphs.Aircraft handling qualities analysis has traditionally been conducted by engineersanalyzing control systems with Computer Assisted Design (CAD) packages. UsingCAD, the engineers generate batch time or frequency histories [Ref. 15] of the designs ofthe FBW flight control systems. The engineers do not interact with the design nor fly thedesign. If a model exhibits complex cross coupling gaining, intuition of the plant isimpaired. The time required to write real-time simulation source code for control laws,aerodynamic models and the hardware interfaces for a real-time simulation prohibitsengineers from direct interaction with their designs until the later stages of design whenchanges are much more difficult. The ability to go from pictures to code allow rapiddevelopment of prototype systems by substituting hardware drivers for simulatedcomponents in an existing simulation then auto-generating executable code. An exampleof the flexibility of the system is demonstrated by the difference in the amount of timerequired to convert the code from c++ to S-functions and for students to create the same7