Flight Control System

This project is aimed at the development of a two tiered Hardware In the Loop (HIL) / Software In the Loop (SIL) Flight Control System.

This project sits above the development work on the STM32 Controller you can find on this site.  While that board was designed for use in this project, because it also lends itself to many other control applications the two are seperate entities in their own rights.

To better understand the project, lets first tackle the opening terminology:

Software In the Loop : Simulation

In this configuration the flight control system (autopilot) is being driven by software outputs, all the math occurs in another bit of software and software based inputs are returned.   As the name suggests, you're not actually testing any real hardware.

This sort of simulation work is great for getting up and running, getting control loops working, ironing out all the really silly bugs in the design etc.   However, if everything stays in software running on a top end 32/64 bit processor, what you don't get is any concept of fault tollerance - the math is always precise, latency issues are non-existant.

Hardware In the Loop : Simulation

As above except this time a number of hardware elements are in the mix with the flight simulation, so now your real flight controller platform is being passed the input data for its sensors.  It has to do the computation (typically on far lower powered processor), then it has to return appropriate outputs - all sufficiently quick enough to maintain control of the flight model.