A Stochastic Compound Failure Model for Testing Resilience of Autonomous Fixed-Wing Aircraft I: Formulation and Simulation

This paper presents a Markov chain model to dynamically emulate the effects of adverse flight conditions (failures) on fixed-wing, autonomous aircraft system actuators. The model implements failures on a PX4 Autopilot flight stack module by perturbing attitude control inputs to the plane's actuator mixer. The approach is applied in simulation to fixed-wing autonomous aircraft to test controller response to stochastic compound failures on a range of turning radii. Statistical measures of the differences between target and simulated flight paths demonstrate that a well-tuned PID controller remains competitive with adaptive control in a cascading, compound, transient failure regime.