Development of a Simulation Environment for Separating Air Vehicles

This paper presents the implementation in MATLAB® and Simulink® of a comprehensive computational framework for the modeling and simulation of a general flying vehicle with major components separating during flight. An initially combined aerial vehicle system will divide at some prescribed moment into a separating component or aerial vehicle, as well as a payload component or aerial vehicle. All three vehicles are considered to perform specific tasks. Simulation results are presented considering the combined vehicle to be a controlled generic missile, the separating component to consist of a large mass structure discarded to crash at a safe location, and the payload vehicle to represent a missile seeking to hit a ground target. The simulation environment is envisioned as an effective tool for the design and analysis of the vehicles and all subsystems involved as well as the main parameters of the missions. To illustrate the functionality and capabilities of the simulation environment, the effects of several mission related parameters with respect to mission success are investigated. The mission parameters include initial conditions, target conditions, and environmental atmospheric conditions. The metrics for mission success are the rate of hitting the target, time to target, and the mitigation of the radar cross section.