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Controlled Emergency Landing of an Unpowered Unmanned Aerial System

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Pillar EngAuthors Info & Claims

Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, Volume 70, Issue 1-4

Pages 421 - 435

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-012-9767-5

Published: 01 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The ability to perform autonomous emergency (forced) landings is one of the key technology enablers identified for UAS. This paper presents the flight test results of forced landings involving a UAS, in a controlled environment, and which was conducted to ascertain the performances of previously developed (and published) path planning and guidance algorithms. These novel 3-D nonlinear algorithms have been designed to control the vehicle in both the lateral and longitudinal planes of motion. These algorithms have hitherto been verified in simulation. A modified Boomerang 60 RC aircraft is used as the flight test platform, with associated onboard and ground support equipment sourced Off-the-Shelf or developed in-house at the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA). HITL simulations were conducted prior to the flight tests and displayed good landing performance, however, due to certain identified interfacing errors, the flight results differed from that obtained in simulation. This paper details the lessons learnt and presents a plausible solution for the way forward.

References

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Buttler, A.: Global hawk emergency prompts hard landing. In: Aviation Week, 1 June 2009.

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Eng, P.C., Mejias, L., Liu, X., Walker, R.A.: Automating human thought processes for a uav forced landing. J. Intell. Robot. Syst. 57(1-4), 329-349 (2010).

Digital Library

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Eng, P.C., Mejias, L., Walker, R.A., Fitzgerald, D.L.: Simulation of a fixed-wing uav forced landing with dynamic path planning. In: Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation, Brisbane, Australia (2007).

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Eng, P.C., Mejias, L., Walker, R.A., Fitzgerald, D.L.: Guided chaos: path planning and control for a uav-forced landing. IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag. 17(2), 90-98 (2010).

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Eng, P.C.S.: Path planning, guidance and control for a UAVforced landing. Ph.D. thesis, Queensland University of Technology (2011).

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Mejias, L., Fitzgerald, D.L., Eng, P.C., Xi, L.: Forced landing technologies for unmanned aerial vehicles: towards safer operations. In: Mung, L.T. (ed.) Aerial Vehicles, pp. 413-440. In-Tech, Kirchengasse, Austria (2009).

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Cited By

Zhou SZhou YXu ZChang WCheng Y(2019)The landing safety prediction model by integrating pattern recognition and Markov chain with flight dataNeural Computing and Applications10.1007/s00521-018-3669-931:1(147-159)Online publication date: 17-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00521-018-3669-9

Controlled Emergency Landing of an Unpowered Unmanned Aerial System
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
2. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Planning and scheduling

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Published In

cover image Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems

Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems Volume 70, Issue 1-4

April 2013

594 pages

ISSN:0921-0296

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Copyright © Copyright © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

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Kluwer Academic Publishers

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 2013

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Cited By

Zhou SZhou YXu ZChang WCheng Y(2019)The landing safety prediction model by integrating pattern recognition and Markov chain with flight dataNeural Computing and Applications10.1007/s00521-018-3669-931:1(147-159)Online publication date: 17-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00521-018-3669-9

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