GNC Systems and Avionics

Using MATLAB and Simulink, control engineers are achieving complex designs without expensive prototypes by simulating the control algorithm with the plant model before implementation. These products help them design for multiple physical configurations, such as the common bus architecture of a satellite design and the three aircraft variations─conventional landing, short landing, and carrier landing—of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). In a single environment, engineers work on:

  • Building and sharing GNC models
  • Integrating and simulating system-level effects of controls and mechanical design changes
  • Reusing automatically generated flight code and test cases
  • Integrating new designs with legacy designs and tools

Rapidly Analyze Data and Customize Analysis Tools

Engineers use MATLAB to quickly perform statistical analysis, signal processing, mapping, and image processing on terabytes of flight and telemetry data, such as vehicle trajectory and engine temperature. They develop custom data analysis applications that can be shared with teams. By leveraging their multicore computers they accelerate data analysis, obtaining results in a fraction of the original computation time.


Generate Optimized and Reusable GNC Designs and Code

Development teams in the aerospace and defense industry face stringent safety requirements for software quality. They rely on Model-Based Design to reduce latent bugs in GNC flight software by linking requirements to their designs, code, and test cases; integrating with existing software architectures; testing earlier in the development phase; and reusing test cases. As a result, they deliver optimized code with fewer errors than code developed with traditional hand-coding methods.


Simplify DO-178 Certification for High-Integrity Systems

Model-Based Design with MATLAB and Simulink is helping engineers meet rigorous mission-critical standards such as DO-178 by facilitating requirements tracing, coverage and robustness testing, and report generation.