This will be a flight control system for flying robots.

• Controls an X-Plane flight simulation over UDP
• Receives UDP packets from X-Plane containing position, accelleration, and attitude data
• Sends UDP packets to X-Plane containing aileron, elevator, rudder, throttle data
• Output system state over UDP to an external glass cockpit application
• Update system state over UDP base on commands from external high-level flight planner
• Controller capabilities
  • Fly lists of waypoints (JSON over UDP)
  • Automatic turn coordinator
  • Total energy controller (altitude, speed, angle-of-attack)

• Autonomous landing
• Will eventually control a real model:
  • Recieve signals from a GPS and plus 9DoF sensor. Likely the CHR UM6.
  • Send commands to PWM output hardware, hence to servos.

Written C to leverage the LLVM toolchain and target embedded systems. Higher level applications (glass cockpit, flight planner) will be writ in Clojure.

System maintains a state singleton in memory that can be read or written to over UDP. At the start of the loop the system reads values from the network, updates the state as necessary. Then the control phase steps its algorithm forward in time according to the values read from the system state. Finally, any selected output values are broadcast.

The system listens on UDP port 46864, and broadcasts on port 46865

Huck UDP packets of JSON at that port. For example, you could just hook a joystick to it:

{
  "state.effector.aileron": .12,
  "state.effector.elevator": .21,
  "state.effector.rudder": .11,
  "state.effector.throttle": .42
}

There is a special key that allows specifies which values should be sent over UDP.

{
  "state.output.values": [ "state.sensor.latitude", "state.sensor.longitude" ]
}

For a list of names see state.h. Each broadcast packet is a 32-bit float representing a value named in state.output.values, in corresponding order.