Trajectory Risk Evaluation for Autonomous Low-Flying Air Transport

The rising effort of rulemaking authorities to open sky for the civil use of large unmanned autonomous aircraft beyond the line of sight created interest to find safe flight for these vehicles to protect the environment. One main of this problem is to mitigate the situation of total loss control over the vehicle followed by an impact somewhere the ground resulting in possible human injuries/fatalities or damage. The first step for such mitigation is to information and data about the ground to be able to areas of dense population or, in general, of high damage . The second step, which is the focus of this paper, the generation of flight paths with respect to a minimal of damage on the ground. The approach presented in this uses a time-discrete forward prediction method to create normally distributed impact area for a vehicle equipped with airframe parachute which is deployed in case of an imminent of control. The proposed algorithm evaluates the risk of a flight path using a newly developed impact location based on an expandable set of nonlinear state equations can be integrated in any existing path planning algorithm.