Development of an Embedded Longitudinal Flight Control Based on X-Plane Flight Simulator

Avionics is a category of electronic systems, equipment and instruments specifically designed for use in aviation. Usually called autopilot, the Automatic Flight Control System, is one of the main systems in avionics. Autopilot systems are designed to automatically control the aircraft piloting, reducing the pilot fatigue caused by the flight. Before being embedded into an aircraft, an autopilot system must be exhaustively evaluated by computational simulations to be validated. The objective of this work is to describe the development of an embedded automatic flight controller aimed to be applied to a Cessna-172SP-Skyhawkmodel aircraft in order to control its altitude. The developed flight controller is based on a tuned PID control and it is embedded in a Raspberry Pi that actually controls the altitude of the aircraft simulated in the X-Plane 11 flight simulator, running on a Desktop PC connected by UDP to the Raspberry Pi. The simulation results validated the proposed flight controller as well as the proposed hardware scheme for validation.