4 ms·
you would be very surprised how difficult avionics are from even a fundamental level. I'll provide a relatively simple example. Just even attempting to design
by virtue3 3y ago
you would be very surprised how difficult avionics are from even a fundamental level.
I'll provide a relatively simple example.
Just even attempting to design a starfox game clone where the ship goes towards the mouse cursor using euler angles will almost immediately result in gimbol lock and your starfighter locking up tighter than unlubricated car engine going 100mph and unable to move. [0]
The standard solution in games(or at least what I used) has been to use quaternions [1] (Hamilton defined a quaternion as the quotient of two directed lines in a three-dimensional space,[3] or, equivalently, as the quotient of two vectors.) So you essentially dump your 3D coordinate into the 4D quaternion coordinate, apply your matrix rotations, then convert back to 3D space and apply your rotations/transforms.
This was literally just to get my little space ship to go where my mouse cursor was on the screen without it locking up.
So... yeah, I cannot even begin to imagine the complexity of what a Boeing 757 (let alone a 787) is doing under the hood to deal with reality and not causing it to brick up and fall out of the sky.
[0] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/8980/euler-angles-and-gimbal-lock https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/8980/euler-angles-a...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion
- iudqnolq 3y agoI don't think we're talking about that kind of software, though. This big was in code that needs to parse a line defined by named points and then clip the line to the portion in the UK. Not trivial, but I can imagine writing that myself. But regardless the more complex the code the worse idea it is to maintain three parallel implementations, if you won't/can't afford to do it properly
- madengr 3y agoI was doing some orientation sensing 20 years ago with an IMU and ran into the same problem. I had never known at the time it was gimbal lock (which I had heard of) but did read quaternions were the way to fix it. Pesky problem.