Automatic safe area detection for novel unmanned air vehicle

Abstract

For experimental and commercial applications of Unmanned Air Vehicles within the middle and heavy weight category, a high level of safety during flights beyond visual line of sight needs to be ensured. Therefore, it is only allowed to operate the aircraft within a certain flight zone, which is defined prior to its flights. If the aircraft leaves the predefined flight area, the responsible operator would be forced to activate the aircraft's termination system, in order to avoid the aircraft from violating the flight zone in any case. This paper focuses on the development and implementation of a safe area detection algorithm for Unmanned Air Vehicles to prevent automatically the aircraft's leaving from its predefined flight zone without action of the operator on ground. It presents a mathematical approach to determine, if the aircraft stays within a certain area and underlines its functionality by appropriate model-in-the-loop simulations of a novel reference Unmanned Air Vehicle configuration. Additionally, a pre-flight verification algorithm of the flight zone is presented. Thereby, prior to flight, the flight zone specification is checked, to ensure a proper flight zone definition and to guarantee the functionality of the safe area detection algorithm. The presented approach can be generalized and applied to any other Unmanned Air Vehicles.