A hardware-software co-design real-time system for barycenter adjustment of trial airplane

To test the stability and performance of an airplane, it's necessary to adjust its barycenter during the trial fight. To cope with this issue, a novel real-time adjustment system for the barycenter of airplane is proposed based on compactRIO (cRIO). With the unique construction of cRIO, the designed system has adopted the hardware-software co-design concept. The program-able hardware (FPGA within cRIO) is utilized to achieve sensor data collection, communication with airplane, PID cycle control algorithm's realization and the output of control signal. In addition, control unit utilizes the CPU of cRIO to achieve the real-time calculation of airplane's barycenter, storage and playback of test data and displaying of user interface. Owing to the well-selected high precision sensors and carefully designed cycle control algorithm, the designed system shows high accuracy of adjustment. The simulation results show that the adjustment speed of this design can reach 2%MAC/min which is better than the majority of similar design with excellent real-time, high reliability, generality and financial practicality and well-designed user interface as well.