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 much less on terminal operation and active contingence management. This talk focuses on autonomous landing particularly on forced landing in emergence. Different from a normal landing procedure consisting terminal area operation and autonomous taxiing, in an emergence situation such as engine-out or critical failure, a human pilot is trained to perform forced landing. It is essential to have similar functions on UAV to minimise the risk to the public and the damage of aircraft. We develop 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 success 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.

Bio

Wen-Hua Chen holds Chair in autonomous vehicles in the Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering at Loughborough University, where he is also heading the Controls and Reliability Research Group. He is the Founding Director of Loughborough University Centre for Autonomous Systems specialised in unmanned aircraft systems and autonomous driving. He joined Loughborough as Lecturer in Flight Control Systems in 2000. Before that, he held teaching positions at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China. Dr Chen has a considerable experience in advanced control and signal processing and their applications in aerospace and automotive engineering. In the last 20 years, he has been spending most of his effort in 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.