Towards Flight Envelope Protection for the NASA Tiltwing eVTOL Flight Mode Transition Using Hamilton–Jacobi Reachability

Abstract

Innovative electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft designs and operational concepts, driven by advancements in battery and electric motor technologies, seek to achieve superior safety records with increased system redundancy. Validating safe flight operations within verified flight envelope regions for passenger flights in densely populated urban environments remains a primary challenge. This paper establishes a framework for applying Hamilton–Jacobi reachability analysis to the full six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) dynamics of the NASA Tiltwing vehicle, verifying the flight envelope during the flight mode transition between near-hover and cruise flight, which prevents loss of control of the vehicle and ensures recoverability to safe trim conditions. This involves first verifying the nominal flight mode transition path as a series of trim points, defining the safe flight envelope using reachability, and decomposing the system dynamics into longitudinal and lateral subsystems. Our formulation guarantees the computed envelope's robustness against modeling errors and uncertainties, and the usage of state decomposition significantly improves the tractability of the reachability computation. The result is validated through Monte Carlo 6-DOF nonlinear simulation of vehicle dynamics, demonstrating that the vehicle states within the flight envelope can successfully recover to trim states and continue the flight mode transition safely.