Development Of A Ship Dynamic Interface Synthetic Environment For A Rotary-Wing Unmanned Air Vehicle

Abstract

This paper describes the work carried out towards the development of a Ship Dynamic Interface (DI) for rotorcraft (crewed & un-crewed) at the Engineering Simulation Facility in Yeovil, UK over the past 7 years. The paper presents the development and validation of the ship DI from a crewed AW159 helicopter perspective and further development on to Rotary Wing Un-crewed Air System (RWUAS) platforms, especially AWHERO helicopter and later on to the Proteus configuration. The ship DI synthetic environment models described in this paper formed fundamental building blocks for the Proteus maritime missions demonstrated to the Royal Navy customer in April 2025. The paper describes how comprehensive FLIGHTLAB flight mechanics models have been successfully ported to a more flexible Simulink environment - an environment where a wide variety of validated and tested helicopter system models were available. One of the key outcomes of this work was the development of the simulation control functionalities of the auto-coded FLIGHTALB model at run-time from a widely used industry standard Matlab/Simulink environment. The Simulink flight model hosting high fidelity FLIGHTLAB flight mechanics models is deployed in the AFCS/Avionics integration rig for testing the control laws used for the Proteus Technology demonstrator aimed for a first flight later in the summer of 2025.