System Automation of a DA42 General Aviation Aircraft

At the Institute of Flight System Dynamics of the Technical University Munich optionally piloted vehicles are being used to demonstrate novel flight control and flight management functions. Therefore a Diamond Aircraft Industries DA42 NG aircraft was modified with a fly-by-wire system to be used as flying OPV testbed. The SystemAutomation module, described in this paper, administers the different cascaded control loops within the digital flight control system of this aircraft. The activation or deactivation of the different loops can be triggered by the flight operator, the external pilot or automatically due to sensor or system failures like GPS-loss or data link-loss. The description of the software includes the different modes, which are provided by the System Automation, the transition conditions and actions from one mode to another and the implementation of the software module. This generic module is implemented using MATLAB, Simulink and Stateflow to be applicable to multiple platforms at the same time.     «

At the Institute of Flight System Dynamics of the Technical University Munich optionally piloted vehicles are being used to demonstrate novel flight control and flight management functions. Therefore a Diamond Aircraft Industries DA42 NG aircraft was modified with a fly-by-wire system to be used as flying OPV testbed. The SystemAutomation module, described in this paper, administers the different cascaded control loops within the digital flight control system of this aircraft. The activation...     »