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Accessing Geographic Data

Postby Zago » Tue Apr 23, 2019 12:10 am

Hi, I'm currently running an autonomy experiment with FlightGear. I would like to simulate a radar sensor that outputs a topographic map of the terrain under an aircraft. Is there a way to extract this information from FlightGear directly or will I need to create my own program to read the scenery files?
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Re: Accessing Geographic Data  

Postby Alant » Tue Apr 23, 2019 12:25 am

Flightgear does not have a built-in air-to-ground radar system that gives a radar map of the terrain.
All a user can do is to scan the earth using techniques such as these : http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Terrain_sampling_in_Nasal, or http://wiki.flightgear.org/Terrain_Detection
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Re: Accessing Geographic Data

Postby Zago » Tue Apr 23, 2019 1:55 am

This seems sufficient for what I want to do. Out of further curiosity, I notice this article mentions it that geodinfo() "queries the built-in terrain cache". Is there further documentation on this cache?
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Re: Accessing Geographic Data

Postby Hooray » Sat May 04, 2019 1:38 pm

it's probably best to look at f_geodinfo() in $FG_SRC/Scripting, which in turn refers to the terrain cache in question, which should reside somewhere in SimGear

For the use-case in mind, it would be best to adapt the Canvas system to come up with a dedicated Canvas view element, we've got plenty of pointers here on the forum and the wiki, search terms would be "canvas synthetic terrain", obviously this would require some C++ glue code and patching sg/fg respectively
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Re: Accessing Geographic Data

Postby PINTO » Sun May 05, 2019 5:02 am

I am already doing something like this
Image

The display resolution is poor due to canvas limitations.

EDIT: to be more helpful, this is using the get_cart_ground_intersection method and querying distances in front of the aircraft. Canvas slows down FG greatly when there are more than ~2000 paths. I explained my testing here: https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... /36485052/. There's also links to higher res images further down in the mailing list thread.

EDIT2: forgot I did a video as well:
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Re: Accessing Geographic Data

Postby Hooray » Sun May 05, 2019 9:45 am

Using path elements is a particularly bad idea, I've exchanged roughly half a dozen PMs with someone from FGUK, I believe it was Necolatis, pointing out how an efficient groundradar scheme can be implemented on top of Nasal and Canvas by using nested raster images, one serving as the "palette" for terrain/elevation colors, and the other one showing/hiding sub-images as needed.

So even without dedicated C++ support, it would be possible to implement this, e.g. as part of the MapStructure framework, and by coming up with a corresponding new layer.

However, Stuart mentioned elsewhere that he might also need such functionality sooner or later, as part of his FG1000 effort, so you might just as well reach out to him, given that he's a core developer, he might be able to add the missing C++ bits - which is basically a sub-class of sc::Image that directly invokes the terrain sampler in C++ space, while applying a custom palette/effect or shader as needed
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Re: Accessing Geographic Data

Postby Johan G » Tue May 07, 2019 5:03 pm

Hmm, so at some point maybe something like this will be possible acquiring a SAR map with the F-35 AN/APG-81 AES radar,[1] Radar mapping with the F-111E AN/APQ-144 radar.[2]

Full video links:
[1] Engadget - Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Stealth Fighter Cockpit Demonstrator Hands-On (11 min YouTube clip) Note that even for one of the more advanced fighter radars of today it still take several seconds.
[2] FlyingHoncho23 - F-111 low level (6 min YouTube clip).
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Re: Accessing Geographic Data

Postby PINTO » Tue May 07, 2019 9:30 pm

Those would be *very* expensive operations with our current nasal library. SAR uses the radar reflectivity of whatever objects it hits, as well as the angle it hits at, to create the image. While possible with our current code, it would not be something done without a large performance hit, and even then it would be at a low resolution.

There was discussion on the mailing list of allowing canvas to directly edit the pixels of an image but I'm not sure if James ever got around to finishing it. This is what was going to be used instead of paths in my example. In addition, my method was going to be used to create a sea-scan radar, whenever I get around to writing it.
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