Sean's pick this week is International Flight Route Planning Simulator by Simulink Dude.

San Diego

At the time of this posting, I will be in San Diego, California. I fully expect to be sitting on a beach or a sailboat getting a nice sunburn instead of shoveling snow off my driveway back in Massachusetts. Alright, who am I kidding, I'll be in a business meeting...

Out of curiosity to see where the planes would fly in order to transport us to Southern California, I turned to the File Exchange and discovered Simulink Dude's Flight Route Planning Simulator.

After downloading it there was a convenient run_me_now file that seemed, well, like I should run it!

My Own Flight Path

It appeared easy to change the example to use my flight termini. All I had to do was change the latitude and longitude vectors.

My flight itinerary is:

So I need to acquire the latitude and longitude of these cities, which could be done with an internet search. Instead, I'll do it completely within MATLAB using the Mapping Toolbox's new webmap functionality.

% Build the webmap.
h = webmap;

Now I need to zoom in on Logan, recording the airport coordinates. I did this interactively, and then extracted the center using wmcenter.

Repeating these steps for San Diego and Dallas yields latitude and longitude vectors of:

% Boston, San Diego, Dallas, Boston
latitude = [42.36532 32.73662 32.89819 42.36532].';
longitude = [-71.00800 -117.19137 -97.04380 -71.00800].';

% Add markers at the airports to check it
wmmarker(h,latitude,longitude);

Now I comment out the latitude and longitude vectors in the run_me_now script and then run it to use the ones I defined. This will pull up the Simulink Model and the Simulink 3D Animation virtual reality world viewer where we'll be able to see the flights:

How neat is that?

Plus, this also means I can now officially say: I've used the Aerospace Toolbox and Blockset :)

Comments

Give it a try and let us know what you think here or leave a comment for Simulink Dude.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® R2013b