Model-based System Health Management and Contingency Planning for Autonomous UAS
Johann M. Ph. Schumann, Nagabhushan Mahadevan, Adam Sweet, Anupa R. Bajwa, Michael Lowry, Gábor Karsai · AIAA Scitech 2019 Forum · 2019
Safe autonomous operations of an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) requires that the UAS can react to unforeseen circumstances, for example, after a failure has occurred.In this paper, we describe a model-based run-time architecture for autonomous on-board diagnosis, system health management, and contingency management.This architecture is being instantiated on top of NASA's Core Flight System (cFS/cFE) as a major component of the on-board Autonomous Operating System (AOS).We will describe our diagnosis and monitoring components, which continuously provide system health status.Automated reasoning with constraint satisfaction form the core of our decision-making component, which assesses the current situation, aids in failure disambiguation, and constructs a contingency plan to mitigate the failure(s) and allow for a safe end of the mission.We will illustrate our contingency management system with two case studies, one for a fixed-wing aircraft in simulation, and one for an autonomous DJI S1000+ octo-copter.