I know the title might be a bit confusing but please hear me out.
I have built a 2 axis motion simulator in my garage with the intent of having it emulate my RC airplane. Sounds pretty simple right? When my airplane rolls, my simulator rolls. When my airplane pitches, my simulator pitches. ect.
But here is the problem. The motion simulator is capable of continuous rotation in either axis (or both at the same time) but cannot yaw. This leads to some interesting scenarios which I cant figure out.
Imagine if the aircraft were to pitch 180 degrees, then yaw 180 degrees
Since the motion simulator can't yaw, this motion would result exactly the same as if the simulator were to only roll 180:
This makes it extremly difficult to calculate which axis I should be moving since, from the simulator's point of view, [180, 180, 0] = [0, 0, 180] (in format [yaw, pitch, roll])
And it's not just this motion that is confusing. [180, 0, 180] = [0 ,180, 0]. Like such:
All this to say that if I'm given an angle such as [180, 180, 0], how do I know what angle to set my motion simulator to (remember that it is only two axis). This would be pretty simple if the simulator could "snap" to a rotation, but since it is mechanical it takes time to rotate. I can't immediately rotate the pitch to 180 and the roll to 180 from zero even though from a mathematical point of view it would end up having the same angle (ignoring yaw). If I tried, the rider would have a good two seconds of disorienting movement.
I know I'm missing something here, but I've been beating my head against this problem with no success. I probably did a terrible job explaining the issue (I have a very hard time putting thoughts into words) Just let me know if I can elaborate at all. Thank you!
If anyone is interested here is the build process of my motion simulator: link