WP2: Fault scenario definition
Considering the operational relevance (checked by Dassault Aviation) and the flight experiment constraints, fault scenarios were defined for each of the flight control performance recovery (WP3) and the navigation and guidance performance recovery (WP4).
WP3: Flight control performance recovery
1) 3 EU partners (ONERA, Universities of Exeter and Bristol) and 2 Japan partners (University of Tokyo and JAXA) have built FDD/FTC approaches on the works initiated in previous projects: indirect and direct adaptive controls, sliding mode control, and structured H-infinity control.
2) The flight test campaigns have been conducted at JAXA’s facility in Japan. Each partner had several test sessions where they achieved code implementation, Hardware-In-the-Loop simulation, and flight experiments of their algorithms on MuPAL-alpha aircraft. These tests were extremely successful. To our knowledge, it was the first time that such advanced FDD/FTC control techniques have been flight-tested on a full-scale piloted aircraft.
3) RICOH and JAXA have proposed an innovative vision-based control surface monitoring system for assisting pilot or FDD function by providing additional information on control surface deflection angles. They have conducted a flight test using MuPAL-alpha to collect image data of its aileron surfaces, and RICOH tested their aileron angle estimation algorithm on the real image sequence.
4) University of Bristol hosted a student from University of Tokyo and a researcher from JAXA, each for a month to work jointly on a FTC controller designs. This contributed to reinforce scientific collaborations between Europe and Japan.
WP4: Navigation and guidance performance recovery
1) USOL has manufactured an unmanned aerial vehicle, called K50-Advanced, dedicated to VISION. Its high payload capacity (100 litters, 20kg) allows it to carry different onboard sensors and systems. The airframe was delivered in October 2016 to ONERA, who has instrumented and ‘dronized’ it with autonomous flight capability. K50 flight authorization was issued by French civil aviation authority in January 2018.
2) Each of SZTAKI and RICOH has developed a prototype of their monocular- and stereo-vision systems to detect and track runway features for aircraft final approach navigation purpose. Both prototypes have been integrated on K50, and flight-tested for image acquisition and real-time image processing. RICOH’s prototype is the world’s first long-range stereo camera.
3) ONERA and SZTAKI have designed vision-integrated navigation filters which fuse the vision system outputs with other navigation sensor measurements (GPS, ILS, IMU, etc.).
The navigation filters are augmented with integrity monitoring function for fault detection and protection level computation. Their navigation performance was evaluated through closed-loop and open-loop simulations with emulated and real sensor data respectively, against sensor faults modelled by ENRI.
4) University of Tokyo and RICOH proposed vision-based obstacle avoidance algorithm by online trajectory planning under the detection uncertainty. They performed numerical simulation evaluation for trajectory optimization, and flight experiments for stereo vision-based flying object detection.
