Autonomous Forced Landing of Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Abstract

Unmanned aircraft systems are gradually penetrating into civil aviation, sharing airspace with manned aircraft. Safely is of paramount importance in future mixed aviation environment. Research has been carried out in addressing mid-air safety such as see and avoid, and safe separation, but there has been less focus on terminal operation and active contingency management. This seminar focuses on autonomous landing, particularly in forced landing situations. Different from a normal landing procedure that consists of terminal area operations and autonomous taxiing, in an emergency situation such as engine-out failure or critical failure, a human pilot is trained to perform forced landings. It is essential to have similar functions in UAV to minimise the risk to the public and aircraft damage. We have developed an autonomous forced landing function consisting of three layers: landing site selection, flight path planning and autopilot. Based on gliding performance and aircraft flight status, a reachability set approach is proposed to predict the maximum coverage of the aircraft. Then, a decision-making tool is produced to identify and rank possible landing sites based on the likelihood of successful landing and other factors. The path planning and autopilot design to cope with or exploit various wind conditions are considered under the recently proposed Goal-Oriented Control Systems framework.

Speaker

Prof. Wen-Hua Chen holds Chair in Autonomous Vehicles in the Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering at Loughborough University, where he is also heads the Controls and Reliability Research Group. He is the Founding Director of Loughborough University Centre for Autonomous Systems, specialising in unmanned aircraft systems and autonomous driving. He joined Loughborough as a lecturer in Flight Control Systems in 2000. Prior to that, he held teaching positions at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China. Prof. Chen has considerable experience in advanced control and signal processing, and their applications in aerospace and automotive engineering. Over the last 20 years, he has been spending most of his effort to developing autonomous system technologies and their applications in transport, defence, agriculture and environment. Prof. Chen is a Chartered Engineer, and a Fellow of IEEE, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, UK.  He has published about 340 papers with over 20,000 citations. Currently, he also holds the Established Career Fellowship of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the most prestigious award by the UK government funding agencies.