Design And Implementation Of Flight Simulation And Mission Path Planning Software For Unmanned Helicopter

At the end of 20th century, the development of unmanned helicopter in world entered a high tide. Currently, many institutes have dived into the research and development of the unmanned helicopter. Because of the characteristics of the unmanned helicopter and the military necessary in the modern war, the high performance unmanned helicopter has taken important role in the national defense system. Development of flight control system has already caused much attention of many countries. The research and development of flight control system is not dissociable with simulation technology. Simulation has become an important tool for successful development of flight control system of unmanned helicopter.This paper focuses on the flight simulation research of flight control system of unmanned helicopter. In this paper, computer graphics,3D animation, available simulation and path planning technologies and so on are synthetically applied. Start from necessary analysis, we built a 3D software framework, including modeling , mapping and animation etc. Based on the need of helicopter simulation, we further developed the model of maneuvers simulation and path planning for unmanned helicopter. By the methodology of separating the math model and geometry model of unmanned helicopter, a geometry model is singly built and is processed with our 3D engine and customized math model. It was also mentioned about the technology of environment simulation including terrain and sky simulation. According to the requirement of path planning, a net model used for navigation points is built up. Forward and backward path searching methods were achieved. The trajectory is displayed on screen with 2D and/or 3D method.Using OpenGL and C++Builder6.0,we developed a flight simulation software-LightDream1.0.This software effectively implemented the real time flight monitoring function, flight simulation, path planning and displaying functions which satisfied the requirement of flight control system simulation of unmanned helicopter. The software can not only build and assign material to simple objects but also implant 3D rendering engine in four views. Using the engine, 3D model created with other software is...