Flight Envelope Discovery for Damage Resilience with Application to an F-16
Hee Jun Choi, Ella M. Atkins, Guoxing Yi · AIAA Infotech@Aerospace 2010 · 2010
Safe aircraft emergency management requires a two-stage real-time response: rst identify the problem, then alter the ight plan and constrain e ector commands to maximize chances of a safe landing. In cases of degraded aircraft performance, commands must respect new ight envelope limits to avoid loss-of-control. In previous work we have proposed an intuitive approach to adaptive ight planning and guidance in which feasible trim states are sequenced into emergency landing ight plans. Sets of feasible trim states and transitions between these states are derived from post-failure aircraft dynamics, enabling the ight planner to focus on real-time generation of landing trajectory geometry (kinematics) without risk of violating dynamics constraints. This paper integrates the guidance and planning algorithms required to autonomously discover the ight envelope and then to plan a path (in real-time) to a nearby landing runway. Our method accommodates nontraditional ight envelope constraints, including cases in which the aircraft cannot maintain straight and/or level ight. Two F-16 control surface jam failure cases are used to illustrate algorithm integration and performance.