Rydal Research proposes to research and demonstrate the feasibility of developing a General-purpose Flight Simulation Interface system that is simple, cost effective, flexible, and powerful enough to meet the needs of current and future Navy simulators. The simulation interface system will provide a mechanism for implementing a distributed modular architecture through which the hardware used for cockpit simulations can be easily added or removed from the simulator to reconfigure for different aircraft or for purposes of upgrading to new instrumentation or controls. The architecture will be based on an efficient, low-cost COTS networking standard. The main components of the system will include FPGA-based interface boards that connect the main simulator computer(s) with the cockpit instrumentation and control modules via the interconnection network. The Simulation Interface system will provide raw data throughput in the 1-10 Gb/s range with latencies in the range of a few hundred nanoseconds while at the same time providing a simple software interface mechanism. This performance will support high-resolution video and real-time interaction between the pilot and the cockpit instrumentation as well as fine-grained control for motors used to provide motion and vibration effects. The development of this system will benefit the Navy in a number of ways. First, it will greatly reduce the complexity of the next generation of training simulators, thereby reducing the cost and development times of these systems. Second, the resulting systems will be easily and quickly reconfigurable, supporting a wide variety of trainers and mission scenarios and contributing to improved mission readiness. Third, the systems will be highly maintainable, contributing to improved availability and lower cost. Finally, the high performance of the interface will easily accommodate future upgrades, lowering the cost and insertion times of future systems.
Keywords: Cockpit Simulators, Real-Time Input/Output, Man-Machine Interface, Modular Architecture, Rapidio, Input/Output Interface, Low-Latency Interconne
