Situational Awareness and Decision-Making for Distressed Aircraft

Situational awareness and decision-making are necessary to identify and select the optimal set of mutually non-exclusive hypothesis in order to maximize mission success by adapting system behavior accordingly. This paper presents a hierarchical and decentralized approach for integrated damage assessment and trajectory re-planning in aircraft with uncertainties in navigational decision-making. Aircraft navigation can be safely accomplished by properly addressing the following: decision-making, obstacle perception, aircraft state estimation, and aircraft control. When inflight failures or damage occur resulting in an emergency, rapid and precise decision-making under imprecise information is required in order to regain and maintain control of the aircraft. In order to fly the pre-planned aircraft trajectory and complete safe landing, the uncertainties in system dynamics of the damaged aircraft need to be estimated and incorporated at the level of motion replanning. The damaged aircraft is simulated via a simplified kinematic model. The different sources and perspectives of uncertainties in the damage assessment process and post-failure trajectory re-planning are presented. The decision-making process is developed via the Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. The objective of the trajectory replanning is to arrive at a target position while maximizing the safety of the aircraft given uncertain conditions. Simulations are presented for an emergency motion planning and landing that takes into account aircraft dynamics, path complexity, distance to landing site, runway characteristics, and subjective human decision. *