Building A Flight Control System For A Modelled Aircraft

Abstract

We modelled an aircraft based on the Airbus A320 and constructed a synthesisable flight control system. The novel feature was the use of C and VHDL, Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Design Language, to allow the flight control system to reside in a Field Programmable Gate Array in a model aircraft or an Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle. The simulator models axial, normal, transverse, pitch, roll and yaw movements. The flight control system has automatic manoeuvre envelope protection and constrained linear and angular accelerations. A graphical front end written in Java makes the flight control system very usable for aircraft engineers.