Optimal Flight Paths for Engine-Out Emergency Landing
Loss of engine power constitutes a major emergency situation in General Aviation (GA) aircraft, requiring the location of a safe-to-land strip within reach, and thereupon planning and executing an effective gliding path towards it. These critical tasks are currently entrusted with the pilot. In recent years, technological advances in avionics (GPS, GIS and computing capabilities) have reached the GA cockpit – clearing the way for safety enhancements that utilize these resources. In this paper we consider the problem of 3D trajectory planning for an engine-cut GA aircraft towards a specified airstrip, while avoiding natural or man-made obstacles. We emphasize energy efficiency, which allows the aircraft to maximally extend its reach. To that end we employ a dynamic model of the aircraft, which leads to a sixdimensional optimal control problem. We propose a computation approach that is aimed at approximating the globally optimal solution in real-time. Our approach is based on motion primitives, or basic maneuvers, which are parameterized flight segments of specified shapes which are locally optimized for energy efficiency. These basic maneuvers enable a coarse discretization of the search space, and the planning problem is reduced to a graph-search problem of tractable size which may be efficiently solved using an optimal graph search algorithm. Important computational enhancements include the use of pre-compiled basic maneuver dictionaries. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is demonstrated via simulation results.
Aircraft trajectory planning dynamic constraints motion primitives engine-off emergency
Avishai Adler Aharon Bar-Gill Nahum Shimkin
Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel Department of Aerospace Engineering, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel
国际会议
The 24th Chinese Control and Decision Conference (第24届中国控制与决策学术年会 2012 CCDC)
太原
英文
2920-2927
2012-05-23（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）