Abstract
As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increase in popularity and usage, an appropriate increase in confidence in their behavior is expected. This research addresses a particular portion of the flight of an aircraft (whether autonomous, unmanned, or manned): specifically, the recapture of the glide slope after a wave-off maneuver during landing. While this situation is rare in commercial aircraft, its applicability toward unmanned aircraft has been limited due to the complexity of the calculations of safety of the maneuvers. In this paper, we present several control laws for this glide-slope recapture, and inferences into their convergence to the glide slope, as well as reachability calculations which show their guaranteed safety. We also present a methodology which theoretically allows us to apply these offline-computed safety data to all kinds of unmanned fixed-wing aerial vehicles while online, permitting the use of the controllers to reduce wait times during landing. Finally, we detail the live aircraft application demonstration which was done to show feasibility of the controller, and give the results of offline simulations which show the correctness of online decisions at that demonstration.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Adams MJ, Tenney YJ, Pew RW (1995) Situation awareness and the cognitive management of complex systems. Hum Factors 37(1):85–104
Bayen A, Tomlin C, Ye Y, Zheng J (2004) An approximation algorithm for scheduling aircraft with holding time. In: Proceedings of the 43rd IEEE conference on decision and control, vol 3, pp. 2760–2767
Callander BD (1998) The evolution of air mobility. J Air Force Assoc 81(2)
Cardaliaguet P, Quincampoix M, Saint-Pierre P (1999) Set-valued numerical analysis for optimal control and differential games. In: Bardi M, Raghavan TES, Parthasarathy T (eds.) Stochastic and differential games: theory and numerical methods, annals of international society of dynamic games, vol 4, Birkhäuser, pp. 177–247
Eklund JM, Sprinkle J, Sastry SS (2005) Template based planning and distributed control for networks of unmanned underwater vehicles. In: 44th IEEE conference on decision and control and European control conference ECC 2005 (CDC-ECC’05), (submitted for publication)
Endsley MR, Strauch B (1997) Automation and situation awareness: The accident at Cali, Columbia. In: Jensen RS, Rakovan L (eds) Proceedings of the ninth international symposium on aviation psychology, pp. 877–881
Greenstreet MR (1996) Verifying safety properties of differential equations. In: Proceedings of the 1996 conference on computer aided verification, New Brunswick, NJ, pp. 277–287
Mitchell I (2005) URL http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mitchell/ToolboxLS
Koo TJ, Sastry SS (2003) Hybrid control of unmanned aerial vehicles for autonomous landing. In: Proceedings of 2nd AIAA ‘‘Unmanned Unlimited’’, AIAA, systems, technologies, and operations-aerospace, land, and sea conference
Meingast M, Geyer C, Sastry SS (2004) Vision based terrain recovery for landing unmanned aerial vehicles. In: 43rd IEEE conference on decision and control, vol. 2, pp. 1670–1675
Mitchell I, Tomlin CJ (2003) Overapproximating reachable sets by Hamilton-Jacobi projections. J Sci Comput 19(1–3):323–346
Mitchell I, Bayen A, Tomlin CJ (2005) A time-dependent Hamilton-Jacobi formulation of reachable sets for continuous dynamic games, IEEE Trans Automat Cont (to appear)
Osher S, Fedkiw R (2002) Level set methods and dynamic implicit surfaces. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg New York
Sprinkle J, Eklund JM, Kim HJ, Sastry SS (2004) Encoding aerial pursuit/evasion games with fixed wing aircraft into a nonlinear model predictive tracking controller. In: Proceedings of the 43rd IEEE conference on decision and control, vol 3, pp. 2609–2614
Sprinkle J, Eklund JM, Sastry SS (2005) Deciding to land a UAV safely in real time. In: Proceedings of American Control Conference (ACC) 2005 (In Publication)
Stevens BL, Lewis FL (2003) Aircraft control and simulation, 2nd edn. Wiley-IEEE, ISBN 0471371459
Tomlin C, Mitchell I, Bayen A, Oishi M (2003) Computational techniques for the verification of hybrid systems. Proc IEEE 91(7):986–1001
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This work was sponsored by the Large National Science Foundation Grant for Information Technology Research (NSF ITR) ‘‘Foundations of Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems’’, Award #0225610, and by Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) ‘‘Software Enabled Control’’ (SEC) Program, under contract #F33615-98-C-3614.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sprinkle, J., Ames, A., Eklund, J. et al. Online safety calculations for glide-slope recapture. Innovations Syst Softw Eng 1, 157–175 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-005-0017-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-005-0017-x