DEVELOPMENT OF THE TERRAIN PROFILE-FOLLOWING SYSTEM FOR MILITARY AVIATION

• Main Author: Gamaliel Sidabutar, Israel
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Subjects: Angkatan udara & pasukan khusus
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/31947
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

This thesis is aimed at providing aerial military assets, such as fighters and bombers, a tool to conceal their presence from the enemy. Specifically, this thesis discusses the development of a terrain-following system that would enable an aircraft to maintain a certain above-ground-level-altitude. To maintain its versatility and compatibility with various aircraft, the Terrain Profile-Following (TPF) system is designed to output universally-recognized autopilot instructions, such as desired altitude, vertical velocity, heading, etc. Accordingly, it accesses available flight data from the simulated aircraft avionics and existing digital terrain elevation data (DTED) acquired from public sources such as the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Subsequent to the development of the TPF system, this thesis also evaluates the effectiveness of the system through a series of computational simulations to ascertain the system’s applicability on military aviation. The development and evaluation of the TPF system utilizes two platforms: (1) the Simulink software as the programming platform on which all the computations and data processing algorithms reside, and (2) the X-Plane software as the simulation platform which sends a multitude of flight data and receives flight instructions to and from the Simulink software. In the simulations, the TPF system repeatedly and consistently proved to be capable of performing multi-waypoint terrain-following flights aboard a multitude of military aircraft types through several routes within the State of Washington, USA. Nevertheless, the system is somewhat hindered by several drawbacks, most of them originated from the sheer amount of random access memory (RAM) required by the system to simultaneously access multiple data points within the DTED.