The Hy-V project will conduct the first-ever mode-transition flight-test for a dual-mode hypersonic scramjet, which will occur at approximately 90,000 feet onboard a sounding rocket. At altitude, atmospheric conditions and inlet flow speed will match the flow conditions simulated in the UVA Aerospace Research Laboratory (ARL) hypersonic wind tunnel. Geometric similarity between the wind tunnel ...

For years the air traffic routes have been fixed by the air traffic controllers on the basis of pre-acquired knowledge. Free flight air traffic management is a solution to move the decision making process for route choices from air traffic controllers to the cockpit. The basic idea is optimize the flight routes in the consideration of multiple objectives .i.e. the optimal path is decided based ...

In this paper, we compare the advanced automation characteristics of Model-based Predictive Controllers (MPC) employed in process control to the more thoroughly studied Flight Management System (FMS) employed in airline cockpits. Our analysis shows that operator interaction with cockpit automation and MPC automation may differ in terms of the level of the control loops at which human control ac...

This paper describes a novel idea of path planning for multiple UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). The path planning ensures safe and simultaneous arrival of the UAVs to the target while meeting curvature and safety constraints. Pythagorean Hodograph (PH) curve is used for path planning. The PH curve provides continuous curvature of the paths. The offset curves of the PH paths define safety margi...

Robotic unmanned aerial vehicles have great potential as surveying and instrument deployment platforms in the exploration of planets and moons with an atmosphere. Among the various types of planetary aerovehicles proposed, lighter-than-atmosphere (LTA) systems are of particular interest because of their extended mission duration and long traverse capabilities. In this paper, we argue that the u...

This paper presents an impact-angle-control guidance law with terminal constraints on the curvature of missile trajectory. The formulation takes into account nonlinear kinematics and time-varying velocity, allowing for more general cases in which flight path angle may not be small throughout entire proposed optimal aims to minimize change rate pseudo-curvature, is defined as a weighting factors...

1. Introduction. In the early hours of March 8, 2014, a Malaysia Airlines Boe-ing 777 disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board [14]. At the time of writing this article there has been no confirmation of any debris from the aircraft and no survivors have been found. 1 If the crash site is not discovered, this tragedy may become one of the great aviation mysterie...

In this paper we propose an ontology pattern that represents paths in a geo-representation model to be used in an aerial path planning processes. This pattern provides semantics related to constraints (i.e., flight forbidden zones) in a path planning problem in order to generate collision free paths. Our proposed approach has been applied on an ontology containing geo-regions extracted from sat...

The flight envelope can be viewed as a set within the state space of an aircraft. For various safety considerations an aircraft is required to remain within its prescribed flight envelope. The safe set is the largest controlled invariant set within the flight envelope. Thus, if an aircraft is to remain within its envelope it must stay within the safe set. When an aircraft is impaired, e.g., a j...

Unmanned aircraft systems use a variety of techniques to plan collision-free flight paths given a map of obstacles and nofly zones. However, maps are not perfect and obstacles may change over time or be detected during flight, which may invalidate paths that the aircraft is already following. Thus, dynamic in-flight replanning is required. Numerous strategies can be used for replanning, where t...