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Controlled Emergency Landing of an Unpowered Unmanned Aerial System

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Australian Research Center for Aerospace Automation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

    Luis Mejias

  2. Aerostructures Group, QinetiQ Pty Ltd, Adelaide, Australia

    Pillar Eng

Authors
  1. Luis Mejias
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  2. Pillar Eng
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Correspondence to Luis Mejias.

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Mejias, L., Eng, P. Controlled Emergency Landing of an Unpowered Unmanned Aerial System. J Intell Robot Syst 70, 421–435 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-012-9767-5

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

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