"Working on the design of the Lunar Module digital autopilot was the highlight of my career as an engineer. When Neil Armstrong stepped off the LM (Lunar Module) onto the moon's surface, every engineer who contributed to the Apollo program felt a sense of pride and accomplishment. We had succeeded in our goal. We had developed technology that never existed before, and through hard work and meticulous attention to detail, we had created a system that worked flawlessly." -Richard J. Gran, The Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Spacecraft Design Then and Now

Use the Control System Toolbox™ and Simulink® Control Design™ to interact with Simulink to design a digital pitch control for the aircraft. In this example, we will design the controller to permit the aircraft to operate at a high angle of attack with minimal pilot workload.

Model six degrees of freedom motion in Simulink®. You can switch between using Euler Angles and Quaternions to model the equations of motion, using the Variant Subsystem block's "Variant > Override using" context menu.

Model flight control for the longitudinal motion of an aircraft. First order linear approximations of the aircraft and actuator behavior are connected to an analog flight control design that uses the pilot's stick pitch command as the set point for the aircraft's pitch attitude and uses aircraft pitch angle and pitch rate to determine commands. A simplified Dryden wind gust model is incorporated to perturb the system.

Use an extended Kalman filter with the MATLAB® Function block in Simulink® to estimate an aircraft's position from radar measurements. The filter implementation is found in the MATLAB Function block, the contents of which are stored in the Simulink model itself.

Generate a movie with 64 frames and a frame size of 64 by 64 pixels (at 10 frames per second). The movie contains a simulation of a moving target that is moving through a structured background that is itself moving. A jitter motion caused by random vibration is also generated (in a Simulink® model called "aero_vibrati") and the jitter motion is added into the overall sensor motion. Finally, the image is blurred through a Gaussian optical point spread function.

Model a conceptual air traffic control (ATC) radar simulation based on the radar range equation.

Use the model of the missile airframe presented in a number of published papers (References [1], [2] and [3]) on the use of advanced control methods applied to missile autopilot design. The model represents a tail controlled missile traveling between Mach 2 and Mach 4, at altitudes ranging between 10,000ft (3,050m) and 60,000ft (18,290m), and with typical angles of attack ranging between +/-20 degrees.

Trim and linearize an airframe using Simulink® Control Design™.