An autonomous flight management system for prevention and recovery of unmanned aerial vehicle loss-of-control

Abstract

An autonomous integrated Loss-of-Control (LOC) Prevention and Recovery (iLOCPR) system for UAVs is proposed with four operation modes: a nominal mode designed for 6 degree-of-freedom (DOF) trajectory tracking by trajectory linearization control; a LOC prevention mode designed by bandwidth adaptation augmentation to the baseline nominal controller for increasing the stability margin in the presence of LOC-prone flight conditions; a LOC arrest mode by reconfiguring the controller to recover and maintain healthy flight aerodynamic angles while temporarily giving up the trajectory tracking mission; a restoration mode to guide the vehicle back to the mission trajectory after successful LOC arrest. A supervisory discrete-event-driven automatic flight management system (AFMS) is designed to autonomously reconfigure the flight controller by coordinating and switching the control modes according to the real-time sensed flight conditions. A full comprehensive simulation entailing the nominal trajectory tracking, LOC prevention, LOC arrest and mission restoration is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of modes switching and the performance of the iLOCPR system. The proposed framework can be further augmented for autonomous fault tolerance and collision avoidance in future development.