X-Plane 11 Simulation Bridge

/ the problem

Testing autonomous flight software on a real aircraft is slow, expensive, and risky. To iterate safely, the flight stack needs a simulator that feeds it realistic flight dynamics and sensor data — so integration bugs surface on the ground, not in the air.

/ approach

• Bridge between X-Plane 11's flight-dynamics engine and the autonomy stack, streaming simulated state into the same interfaces the real aircraft uses
• Sensor-to-world coordinate mapping so simulated sensor feeds line up with real-world reference frames
• HITL (hardware-in-the-loop) and SITL (software-in-the-loop) modes for end-to-end validation of the flight pipeline
• Modern C++ with custom serialization for the sim↔stack data path

/ results

• End-to-end validation of flight dynamics and sensor-to-world coordinate mapping
• Let the team catch integration issues on the ground, before real flights

/ architecture

/ media

/ links