Toward Autonomous Aircraft Emergency Landing Planning

Path Planning;Unmanned Aircraft Systems;Flight Planning;Emergency Landing;Aerospace Engineering;Engineering;Aerospace Engineering

Almeida di donato, Pedro FernandoPanagou, Dimitra ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Path Planning;    Unmanned Aircraft Systems;    Flight Planning;    Emergency Landing;    Aerospace Engineering;    Engineering;    Aerospace Engineering;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/140916/pdonato_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Increasingly autonomous (IA) systems support aircraft flight crews in all tasks required for safe emergency landing when encountering high-risk scenarios. IA systems also enable unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) reaction to anomalies faster than is possible via remote pilot intervention. This dissertation develops autonomous path planning, emergency landing site identification, and risk assessment capabilities applicable to manned and unmanned aviation. The first contribution is to extend existing methods in geometric flight planning to increase the range of an airplane following total loss of thrust. Careful consideration of longitudinal and lateral motion steady flight coupling expands on previous work. A safety-prioritized emergency flight planner considers path feasibility and aircraft envelope to maximize the ability of the aircraft to execute the emergency landing safely. Optimal control is next investigated as an alternative approach for emergency landing planning. Maximum range glide paths obtained from the geometric method are compared with optimal control results. Recoverable sets and reference governors provide feasible transitions between steady-state conditions. Geometric path planners are then adapted to exploit these transition graphs in support of different failure scenarios. Data from sources not previously explored are exploited for optimal emergency landing site selection and approach planning. A method is proposed to identify and assess the risk of road segments that could serve as airplane emergency landing sites exploiting a publicly-available map database. Mining the same detailed map database allows the identification of other areas to serve as emergency landing fields for different UAS platforms. Risk assessment of these areas exploits map and mobile phone data to provide a real-time risk estimate that accounts for time-dependent population density near the candidate landing site. Census and real-time mobile phone data are exploited to generate the real-time occupancy map used to assess flight path risk. Case studies, some based on published accident reports, illustrate and validate in simulation the mathematical and algorithmic methods presented in this dissertation.