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Most of flight simulators are based on expensive workstations
or other high-end computing equipment. To provide a high-end and
low-cost flight simulator, an experiment using networked
personal computers (PCs) for fairly sophisticated flight
simulation with DIS protocol is presented. Two Pentium PCs
connected with TCP/IP or IPX local area network protocol are
used as a flight simulator. One of them is used as the work
platform for the computation of flight dynamics and Dead
Reckoning models, and implementaon of pilot interface. The other
one is used as the work platform for visual effect and DIS
system. In this study, the flight dynamic model of flight
simulator is derived. The aircraft is assumed as a rigid body,
the behavior of flight can be described by Six-Degree-of-Freedom
(6DOF) equations of motion. Also the real-time configured
numerical integration method, and the coordinate systems, earth
model, which are compatible with the DIS protocol, are
developed. Dead Reckoning (DR) algorithm is an important chnique
that is widely used in DIS. The purpose of DR is to reduce
updates required by each simulator on the network to better
utilize the available bandwidth. Extrapolation formulas are
discussed based on network communication traffic and the amount
of computation performed by simulators. Smoothing method used
during data update process is also discussed. With this study, a
low cost, efficient high-fidelity networked PC flight simulator
is feasible.
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