A highly-automated RPAS mission manager for integrated airspace
Hèctor Usach, Joan Vila, Alfons Crespo, Pedro Yuste · 2015
This paper addresses the problem of defining Mission Plans for Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) and designing a software architecture for executing such plans. A RPAS Mission Plan for integrated airspace usually includes flight procedures in controlled airspace as well as procedures for the operations area, which usually is in a non-controlled airspace. Procedures for controlled airspaces must adhere to standard regulations, but nothing has been yet standardised for the operation in non-controlled airspaces. Some coherent extension to traditional Flight Plans is needed to specify all flight procedures in a coherent manner. This paper advocates extending ARINC-424 route definitions with RPAS specific features. On the other hand, RPAS do need a higher level of automation than manned aircraft due to many reasons: lower situational awareness, need for higher autonomy upon C2 link failures, or higher accuracy operation. This fact has important implications on the degree of automation and the definition of the Mission Plan. Firstly, different operational modes with different levels of automation are required. Secondly, traditional Flight Plans should be also extended to specify automatic flight procedures triggered by events like C2 link failures, or collision avoidance that could lead to unsafe conditions. The paper also discusses in detail the design of a Mission Manager for supporting the previous features based on a three-tiered (3T) architecture. The porting process of this architecture to an ARINC-653 compliant execution platform based on XtratuM is also introduced.