Engineers at Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems Sector, El Segundo, Calif., needed coding tools to build their real-time trajectory generation flight software. They found a solution in MATLAB and other products from The MathWorks in Natick, Mass.
Northrop designers used MATLAB, Simulink, Stateflow, and Real-Time Workshop Embedded Coder to build the new application. They used these model-based design tools to reduce the development time of the high-integrity flight software. For more information, see www.mathworks.com.
The product-Northrop Grumman Trajectory Generation (NGTG) software-enables real-time computation of feasible unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) trajectories on approach to a simulated landing.
The unmanned-aerial-vehicle flying test bed was featured during flight demonstrations and experiments at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. The event, conducted as part of the SEC program sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), demonstrated emerging autonomous control technologies that will allow real-time collision avoidance, autonomous evasive maneuvers, autonomous rerouting in response to pop-up threats and in-flight faults, and even UAV mission tasking using voice commands and a common language vocabulary.
“This real-time trajectory generation technology will enhance the survivability and reliability of our UAV product line,” says Robert Miller, Northrop Grumman Software Enabled Control (SEC) Principal Investigator. “MathWorks tools continue to play a major role in our ability to develop flight software.”
