Hi everybody,
I am quite, quite new to FlightGear and have some questions. In a nutshell, I'm doing some academic research and am considering using FlightGear / JSBSim in order to get some work done.
I am curious about some of the following...please let me know if I'm attacking this from the wrong direction or going way off base .
What I would like to do is model some very simple flyers (basically microcopters, but with less emphasis on airframe/aerodynamics and more on simply controlling them), and then have some algorithms running that would control the flyers independently. Basically I want to create a swarm of flying robots and be able to play with how they are controlled.
From my understanding of the guides/wiki and so on, the aircraft are modeled via XML files. I currently have some basic 3D models of my flyers done up in SolidWorks, and it seems that I can figure out a way to export them into the FlightGear model type. Since the craft are very basic I imagine it won't be too hard to model them.
What I would like to know is if FlightGear could support multiple aircraft in a single instance (not a multiplayer server...I'd like to just spawn a bunch of these things), and also each having their own independent brain which I would provide functionality for, based on the output of the algorithms that I run.
Also, is it possible that any sort of sensing equipment is implemented here as well? I'd kind of like to give them a target and tell them to simply "go to that" as well.