A Transputer Based 3D-Graphics System

Abstract

The Institute for Flight Mechanics operates the flying simulators ATTAS (a wing aircraft) and ATTHeS (a helicopter), their respective ground based simulators and uses realtime and offline simulations for system identification and other purposes. Based on a parallel transputer architecture, a 3D-graphics tool for visualization and view simulation to be used with the simulations has been developed. The tool uses data received by telemetry, realtime data from a simulation, or recorded data to show the movement and orientation of an aircraft in realtime 3D-graphics. The aircraft or scene may be observed from any point of view. Placing the camera in the cockpit of the aircraft and showing the environment results in a view simulation. The use of a parallel transputer architecture allows a modular and scalable structure, i.e. the system may be adapted to the needs of the application. By adding software modules and transputers we may include 24 bit colour, shadowing, a higher resolution, a better shading algorithm or other things which are required by an application. On the other hand we may remove transputers to get a small and cheap system if the requirements are low. A small system may consist of only 8 transputers, whereas a big system may include 50 or 60 transputers.