Ground Impact and Hazard Mitigation for Safer UAV Flight Response

As Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become more commonplace, there is a growing need for safer flight control software that allows for the UAV to understand and autonomously react to various flight anomalies. Decision-making software must allow the aircraft to perform tasks such as detect and avoid, as well as respond to critical failures mid-flight. This paper develops a ground impact and hazard mitigation (GIHM) module that integrates the following: (1) consideration of flight failure modes, (2) generation of feasible ground impact footprints based on glide equations, (3) selection of safest response ground impact sites based on a high resolution LandScan USA population dataset, and (4) controlled descent to selected site. For a sample population distribution, integration of GIHM with standard UAV flight software shows a reduction of 20.396 casualties per 100,000 flight hours compared to the flight software without GIHM. A 96% reduction in fatalities per flight hour resulted from incorporating this module, which brings UAVs closer to being safe enough to be integrated into the National Airspace System (NAS).