I am working on improving cockpit automation interfaces and will be using a PC based simulation as part of that effort. I am considering using Microsoft’s FSX, Flight Gear, X-Plane or Prepar3D. I’m leaning toward Flight Gear as it is open source and may be easier to develop interfaces with it using custom software. I wanted to ask other researchers what opinion they have regarding the suitability of these platforms for academic research especially when failure simulations will be created?
I have worked a bit with FlightGear and if User Interfaces are part of your research I would recommend it. It also has a quite large support community.
I don't know much about the other sims, but X-Plane lets you access simulation data via UDP. Two of my students wrote an interface which we could use to get sim outputs and write sim inputs. The number of accessible states / parameters is fairly comprehensive.
You'll find information about the protocol at http://www.nuclearprojects.com/xplane/xplaneref.html
Cheers,
Marc
Thank you guys for your answers, in my research I would like to add a separate display for additional information to the pilot(s). Flight Gear has a scripting language and X-Plane has a SDK that may provide what I need. I'm still developing my testing scenario but I wish to learn what software can best be adapted to my research. Thanks again for the information.
Hi, to my research I used FlightGear. As you already know it's open source and I can tell you that it's not so difficult to program your own extensions. Anyway I just used it for the 3D visualisation since the flight dynamics was provided in real-time by Simulink via UDP. I've no programming experience with X-Plane, by the way it's a really good software and, I don't know if you need it, but there is also an FAA certified version.
It's common to use X-PLANE, but I invite you to use FlightGear because it's open ok.
We used FlightGear for our aerodynamics R&D projects. It is flexible and has a huge community.
I decided to go with X-Plane, because it has features to interact with other software which I'm planning to add on, but I appreciate your input.
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