Developing Automated Contingency Procedures for the ATOL System of a Fixed-Wing UAV through Online FDD

At the Institute of Flight System Dynamics of the Technische Universität München, a digital flight control system is developed for highly-automated operation of the novel fixed-wing UAV ‘SAGITTA Demonstrator.’ It features an automatic take-off and landing (ATOL) system, for which safety and reliability of operation are crucial, especially with respect to unforeseen interferences, errors or malfunctions. Therefore, functional monitoring and fault detection algorithms are employed to observe aircraft and flight control system performance. Building on these, this paper presents the extension of the ATOL system by an aircraft-condition-based availability algorithm in combination with automated contingency procedures. Depending on the availability status, the conduct of a nominal automatic take-off or landing is automatically aborted with a corresponding contingency maneuver, or continued with an altered procedure at reduced performance. The ATOL contingency procedures for all relevant cases have been designed for SAGITTA and evaluated in simulation. Corresponding results are presented in this paper. Future work includes further testing of the ATOL system in a hardware-in-the-loop environment in preparation for the maiden flight of SAGITTA.     «

At the Institute of Flight System Dynamics of the Technische Universität München, a digital flight control system is developed for highly-automated operation of the novel fixed-wing UAV ‘SAGITTA Demonstrator.’ It features an automatic take-off and landing (ATOL) system, for which safety and reliability of operation are crucial, especially with respect to unforeseen interferences, errors or malfunctions. Therefore, functional monitoring and fault detection algorithms are employed to observe aircr...     »