Autonomous Emergency Flight Management for UAS Landing Site Selection
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current emergency flight management systems for unmanned aerial systems (UAS) lack the capability to autonomously select and verify safe landing sites in populated areas, especially for small UASs, which are crucial for reliable operations and FAA certification.
Innovation Solution
An autonomous emergency flight management system that utilizes a precompiled database of landing sites, combined with a vision system and adaptive controls, to identify and verify safe landing sites, and navigate the UAS to a safe location, even with impairments, using onboard computing and sensors like GPS, cameras, and autopilot systems.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If an autonomous emergency flight management system is implemented for small UASs, then the reliability and safety level meets FAA certification requirements, but the device complexity and cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The emergency flight management system is divided into distinct functional modules: a database module storing pre-compiled landing site information, a selection module that identifies suitable landing sites, and a verification module using vision systems to confirm site safety. This segmentation allows each module to be optimized independently while working together to achieve high reliability without overwhelming system complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
Landing site information is pre-compiled and stored in a database before emergency situations occur. The system prepares potential landing sites in advance with relevant data, so that during an emergency, the selection module can quickly retrieve and evaluate preprocessed information rather than gathering data in real-time, reducing response time and computational burden during critical moments.
2Measurement precision
If a vision system and precompiled database are used to verify landing sites, then the accuracy of safe landing site identification is improved, but the use of energy and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The database module pre-compiles and stores landing site information including geographic data, terrain characteristics, and safety parameters before the UAS needs them. This preliminary preparation reduces the computational burden during emergency operations, as the vision system only needs to verify against preprocessed data rather than analyzing raw environmental data in real-time, thereby reducing energy consumption while maintaining verification accuracy.
3Ease of manufacture
If the system provides small, low-cost solution for small UASs, then the cost and payload impact are reduced, but the functionality and reliability may be compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The emergency flight management system is designed with universal components that can be integrated into small UASs without requiring specialized expensive hardware. The database module, selection module, and vision verification system use commercially available technologies and standard computing platforms, enabling the system to provide reliable emergency landing capabilities at low cost while maintaining functionality across different UAS platforms.
Data Source
AI summary
An autonomous emergency flight management system may find safe and clear landing sites for unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in emergency situations. Emergency flight management software may reside on an onboard computing system. The computing system may continuously look at internal databases and input from other systems (e.g., a global positioning system (GPS), camera, compass, radar, sonar, etc.), depending on what is available. The emergency flight management system may make decisions on its own without human intervention. For instance, a database may provide some local likely candidates for landing sites. Information associated with the candidates may include latitude, longitude, altitude for top of a building, etc. Position updates may be continuously provided from an autopilot or other suitable system.