An air combat simulator in the virtual reality with the visual tracking system and force-feedback components

This work presents a new multi-plane air combat simulator based on the visual servo system. The scenario is an air combat of two fighters in virtual reality. The escaping one is simulated by a Stewart platform with a force-feedback joystick, overall controlled by a human operator. The chaser is realized as a visual servo system, as if the simulated air fighter was equipped with a military light-of-sight (LOS) to lock on to the mentioned escaping air fighter. Specifically, any arbitrary-shaped object that appears on a screen reflecting the virtual space of the escaping fighter can be automatically detected and located by the visual system in real-time so that the 2-DOF camera simulating LOS can be controlled due to visual servo to keep the target object centered in the camera image. By sensing the motion of the camera platform, the autopilot of the chasing fighter tries to follow the escaping one as closely as possible with an aim of shooting it down. The overall system is experimented in a virtual reality environment to validate the underlying research work. A promising application of this setup is to evolve into an entertainment facility or a military training platform.