Design And Implementation Of Semi-physical Virtual Artificial Horizon Based On FPGA

Aircraft Comprehensive Training Emulator (ACTE) is a kind of indispensable technical equipment used in the research, teaching, experiment of modern aviation, which has high economic and military value in the research of flight performance, flight quality evaluation and flight training etc. Artificial horizon, an instrument of cockpit meter systems of the ACTE, is mainly used to indicate the flight attitude, such as pitching angle and tilt angle etc.This paper mainly discusses the design of a semi-physical virtual artificial horizon, proposes the solutions of design difficulties. The feasibility of the design and key solutions is proved through actual tests.FPGA is chosen as the controller of the semi- physical virtual system. In order to make the design more lifelike, a solution based on the 3D coordinate transformation is proposed. To meet the high demand for real time performance, graphic display solution based on directly reverse transform algorithm, which puts aside the cache, is adopted.In order to improve the speed of the system, LUT is used for the calculation of the arc-cosine function. Non-Restoring square root algorithm is adopted for the design of square root unit, and floating point numbers are converted into unsigned integers for calculation as well. Two four-stage pipelines are created to improve system performance.UART controller and LCD display control module are designed for the improvement of the integrity of the whole system. The design of color generating module, which codes color and marks the location of the coordinate line and digital scale, reduces the complexity of algorithm.This paper implements the hardware and software design of the semi-physical artificial Horizon of the cockpit, which meets the custom's needs. The design process and method can be a reference for other instruments in the ACTE system.