Development of ROS-based Flight and Mission State Communication Node for X-Plane 11-based Flight Simulation Environment

A novel robot-operating-system-based flight and mission state communication node for X-Plane 11 flight control simulation environments and its simulation results were discussed. Although the proposed communication method requires considerable implementation steps compared with the conventional MATLAB/Simulink-based User Datagram Protocol (UDP) block utilization method, the proposed method enables a direct comparison of cockpit-view images captured during flight with the flight data. This comparison is useful for data acquisition under virtual environments and for the development of flight control systems. The fixed/rotary-wing and ground terrain elements simulated in virtual environments exhibited excellent visualization outputs, which can overcome time and space constraints on flight experiments and validation of missionary algorithms with complex logic.