The Designing and Realizing of the Satellite Navigation Simulation System Visualization Software

Tao Liu, Yushan Zhao and Shijie Xu School of Astronautics Beihang University, BUAA Beij ing 100191, China ltaobh@sina.com

Abstract

In order to visualize the satellite navigation simulation system, the framework of a distributed satellite navigation simulation system composed of multi-platform systems was analyzed. The composition and the functions of the satellite navigation simulation system visualization software were illuminated. Based on MFC, presented the designing and realizing methods of the system information display program and the 2D display program. The Vega Prime program designing methods,

using the Visual C++, were introduced, and also the structure, the designing and realizing methods of the 3D display program were proposed. Based on OpenGL, Vega Prime and Visual C++, using the designing and developing methods discussed in this paper, the satellite navigation simulation system visualization software was developed. Practical application of the software shows that the visualization scheme proposed here is entirely feasible for practical engineering application.

I. INTRODUCTION
Modeling and simulation plays an essential role in the designing stage of the aerospace engineering. An accurate and vivid simulative description of a system provides the design engineer the possibility to expedite the design process. The visualization software, based on visual reality technology, can show the working states and mission progress of an astronautic system intuitively to users, and help them gain the general information about the system quickly, and is a useful tool for the design and analysis of the astronautic system. Until now, in china, almost all the visualization software for aerospace engineering are developed for one given mission, without flexibility, as in [13]. And the spacecraft simulation software developed by foreign commercial companies, e.g. Satellite Tool Kit (STK), comprehensive but not accurate enough for some special tasks. Take the satellite navigation system serving for ground users for example; the visual effect of STK is not good enough.

Under the background, the satellite navigation simulation system visualization software was developed, which has three kinds of functions, namely system information display, 2D display and 3D, could visualize realistically all of the working states of the satellite navigation simulation system and the whole procedures it serves for users. The software has sufficient flexibility and could be used for other aerospace visualization mission after little change. This paper discussed the structure of the satellite navigation simulation system and the functions of its subsystems To satisfy the needs of the satellite navigation simulation system, the satellite navigation simulation system visualization software was designed, which is composed of three programs, namely the system information display program, the 2D display program and the 3D display program. The design of the functions, the developing procedures, the data structures and the realizing methods of the system information display program as well as the 2D display program, based on the Graphical Device Interface (GDI) of Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC), were presented. Then the techniques to design Vega Prime programs based on the Visual C++ were introduced, and also the functions, the structure, the developing procedures and realizing methods of the 3D display program were proposed. Finally, by simulating the process of navigating multiple users, this satellite navigation simulation system visualization software supplied vivid display effect, and it validated the feasibility of the designing methods and techniques discussed here.

II. THE STRUCTURE OF SATELLITE NAVIGATION SIMULATION SYSTEM

In space mission simulation, a whole satellite navigation simulatIon system consists of multiple subsystems: navigation satellite simulator, constellation simulator, telecontrol and telemetry system simulator, user simulator, visualization software, data server and so on, as in [4]. Navigation satellite simulator is used to simulate all the subsystems of a navigation satellite in semi-physical and mathematical manners. Constellation simulator can complete the mathematic simulation of the constellation, like the signal coverage percentage of the constellation,

communications between the satellites of the constellation, the analysis of the navigation characteristics, and so on. Telecontrol and telemetry system simulator is used to simulate the management of the data flow of the satellite navigation system, the sending and management of the telecontrol instructions, the processing and management of the telemetry data. User simulator is used to generate the simulation data of the tracks, the attitude, the running states of all kinds of users which move on the ground, or fly in the air, or else sail the oceans. The visualization software provides a method to visualize all of the working states of the satellite navigation simulation system and verify the whole system in a visual manner. At the beginning of the virtualization simulation, across the local Ethernet, the visualization software firstly associates its virtual reality objects with the simulation data in the database of the data server, and then the software receives packets from the data server and drives the virtual reality objects and updates the display. All the subsystems above communicate and are synchronized with each other through data server. Simultaneously, the data server also is responsible for the data stream of the satellite navigation simulation system under control, and has to preside over parameter setting for all of the simulation subsystems. These subsystems compose a distributed simulation condition as shown in Fig. 1.

III. THE DESIGNING AND REALIZING OF THE VISUALIZATION SOFTWARE

As described in the introduction, the satellite navigation simulation system visualization software is composed of three programs, the system information display program, the 2D display program and the 3D display program. The functions, the structures, the designing and realizing methods of those programs will be discussed in detail in this chapter.

A. System Information Display Program

1)function
This program is used to display the working information of the simulation system, including data sources, simulation time, and configuration information and so on. In order to improve visual effect and the flexibility of the program, it provides a control library, which contains text control, curve control, radar control, and other basic controls. Utilizing the control library, users can design the most appropriate visual interfaces according to their requirements.

2) The Design of Control Classes

In order to manage controls efficiently, the interface designing module is designed and embedded in the program as a dynamic-link library (DLL). Please refer to [5] for more details about DLL. The module encapsulates different types of controls, and interface functions for modifying the control properties. The structure of those control classes is shown in Fig. 2.

In accordance with object-oriented programming methods, all the controls and their interface functions are derived from the base class named CBaseControl, which provides a basic public data set and a set of functions which supports such operations as adjusting the location, size and other visualization properties of controls, updating the controls' states, and so on. But those functions of CBaseControl class are virtual and are not defined yet. All control classes derived from CBaseControl, for example, CMeterControl class for meter control and CCurveControl class for curve control, must provide the implementations of those virtual functions according to their own characters, by overloading the virtual member functions of the base class. As an illustration, the virtual function, Show (CDC* pDC), used to redrawing controls, has been differently implemented in different derived control classes. Besides virtual functions, the control classes also contain their own unique attributes and operations.

3)structure
The system information display program is designed based on MFC. The Device Context (DC) and GDI are used. Please refer to [5] for more details about MFC, DC and GDI. By Windows message-mapping machinery, the program can

update and redraw various controls simultaneously via the view class in the program, to achieve visualization capabilities. During the simulation process, the program is required to not only interact with the user, but also receive simulation packets across the Ethernet. Therefore, the program uses multi-threaded architecture. The first thread, called main thread, is started when the program is initiated, then creates the MFC frame window, after that users can design and save the visual interface which is used for the display of the system information. The design process is as follows. First, create a blank display interface, add controls and modify the controls' properties, and then, design the layout of the visual interface. After that, establish the mapping of control set to data-base data set, and then the system information interface is ready for displaying. The other thread, started in the main thread, is network client thread, which is made to receive packets and transmit useful data to the main thread via the shared memory. The working procedures of the two threads are shown in Fig. 3.

B) 2d display program
The 2D display program is employed to draw planar images, such as the world map, the ground tracks, the coverage areas and the covering characters of the satellites or the constellation. Moreover, the program is also able to display the working states, orbit parameters and attitude parameters of various spacecrafts. The designing and realizing methods of the 2D display program are simIlar to those of the system information display program, also using the DC as well as the GDI of MFC and via Windows message-mapping machinery to fimsh ItS functions. Fig. 4 Illustrates the basic processing flow of the 2D display program. This program has two threads, the display thread and the network client thread. As shown in Fig. 4, the relationship between the two threads likes that of the system information display program. The GDI plotting loop is the core of the 2D display thread, and it responds to the user's inputs and uses the network packets to carry out the main functions of the program, such as drawing ground tracks, coverage areas of the satellites, drawing communicatIOn lmks between the ground stations and the satellites; besides, it makes use of the inside calculating module to finish the calculation and display of the covering characters of the satellites or the constellation. To keep the properties and operations for the objects that need to be plotted, the C++ classes have been designed, as shown m Fig. 5. The CBaseObject class is the base class which defines the general properties of all objects, such as name, position as well as data identification and so on. The CMobileObject class derived from the CBaseObject is designed for the moving objects, and it has functions of updating the properties and plotting, but those functions are virtual functions. The implementations of them are provided by the classes derived from the CMobileObject class; for instance, the CSatellite class is used to keep properties related to satellite, and provides functions for drawing the orbits, the coverage areas and so on. The CGroundStation class keeps properties for ground stations.

c) 3d display program
1)function
This program has the following functions: the 3D display of the movements of satellites, users (e.g., cars, planes, ships) and so on, which are built in 3D models; providing multiple scenes and various viewpoints display abilities building on the fundament of the 3D model library; could switch among the multi scenes, including: the launch phase of satellite, the working phase of satellite in orbit, the phase of the navigation constellation working in orbit and serving the users. The 3D display program also provides multi-window display for a certain simulation stage, in order to observe the simulation process from various viewpoints simultaneously.

2)structure

The 3D display program is a Vega Prime display program based on MFC, so when the program starts to run, it requires thee Vega Prime to start a thread for scene rendering, Which is independent from the user thread, as in [2]. Except for the two threads mentioned above, this program still needs to begin a network client thread to receive the simulation data. The framework of the program is shown in Fig. 6.

The 3D display program transmits the packets and user' s controlling instructions to the Vega Prime thread via the user thread, and then the Vega Prime thread completes the rendering of the 3D objects as well as the controlling of the movements of those objects, using the scene rendering interface functions provided by Vega Prime. The scene rendering effects are shown to users via the 3D scenes in the view window. The program based on MFC could respond to keyboard and mouse messages, and that is what makes it is possible for the user to control the display of the 3D scenes by inputting the controlling instruments according to the operation of simulation.

Fig 7 gives the basic processing flow chat of the program. The program finishes the tasks related to the display of the Vega Prime scenes in a separate thread. By this way, the scene rendering and processing speed could be accelerated; furthermore it could alleviate the burden of scene display for the user thread, so the responding to user's operations speeds up. The user thread is mainly responsible to respond to the messages from computer systems. Because the network client thread and the Vega Prime thread are separated, it is necessary that the program provides shared memory for the two threads to share mutual data with each other, and moreover, the message passing machinery is used to

pass the user control instructions received by the user thread to the Vega Prime thread.

3)class design
On the basis of the structure design and the process analysis, in order to realize all of the functions mentioned above, the 3D display program needs many classes. The relationships among the main classes are shown in Fig. 8. As seen in Fig. 8, the chasses in the dashed frame are Vega Prime classes which are defined and realized by the Vega Prime, and the others are user-defined. Among all the user-defmed classes, the CDataBase class is the base class, which defines the general properties of all the objects, such as the name, the position and so on. The CObject class, the CObserver class and the CDofDbj class are derived from the CDataBase class, and they are used to keep the information about 3D objects, viewpoints, and DOF nodes, respectively. The CScene class defmes all of the properties needed to render 3D scenes, such as the name, the locations and some Vega Prime objects. The CObsMgr class,the CObjMgr class, the CDofMgr class and the CSceneMgr class, called controlling classes, could control the viewpoints, the 3D objects, the DOF nodes and the 3D scenes respectively, by the function call of Vega Prime API. Based on OpenGL, the CVpOpenGL class is developed to get some special rendering effects, like orbit drawing, star field simulation, the rendering of rocket flame and radar wave, for example. Please refer to [6] for more details about OpenGL. The CVpOpenGL class functions are called via channel callback function mechanism, so these inclass functions of the CVpOpenGL class must subscribe to the channel events first. The CVpApp class is derived from vpApp---the Vega Prime core class. Besides aggregating the controlling classes and the CVpOpenGL class mentioned above, the CVpApp class calls the in-class functions of these aggregated classes to accomplish the rendering of all of the scenes, and the detailed works include the configuration of the 3D scenes, adding subscribers to channel events, the control of the object movement, updating the frames and so on. The 3D model database used in the scenes is established by applying the three-dimensional modeling software MultiGen Creator, and the model is formed by multiple tiny triangles.

IV. SIMULATION INSTANCE AND EFFECT

According to the designing and realizing methods discussed above, using Visual C++ and Windows XP as the software developing platform, based on Vega Prime and OpenGL, the satellite navigation simulation system visualization software are developed. The running result of the software is shown in Fig. 9. Fig. 9(a), (b) and (c) are the program running screenshots of the system information display program, the 2D display program and the 3D display program, respectively.

V. RESULTS
Aim the visualization of the satellite navigation simulation system, the structure of a distributed satellite navigation simulation system composed of multi-platform subsystems was analyzed. Then associating the techniques of visual simulation with the techniques of satellite navigation, designed the satellite navigation simulation system visualization software, and discussed the developing technique as well as the realizing methods. Based on the scheme and techniques mentioned above, the satellite navigation simulation system visualization software has been realized, and it has spectacular visual effect. After simulation verification, it is proved that the visualization scheme of the software stated above is feasible. Nowadays, the software has already been employed in engineering area, and facilitates the design and analysis of the aerospace system. Besides, the above-mentioned designing and realizing methods as well as the applied techniques are useful for developing the similar systems.

(a)

(b)

(c) Figure 9. Visualization softwares' display effects: (a) the running effect of the system information display program. (b) The running effect of the 2D display program. (c) The running effect of the 3D display program.

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