Automated Mission Management of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Critical Events in Urban Air Traffic

Robin Müller, Maximilian Bauer

2024

Abstract

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have a great potential to benefit society. This has already been shown in many use-cases. Nevertheless the true potential lies in the upscaling of operations. Therefore a high automation level and ensured safety is needed. A common approach to adress safety in aviation is a risk analysis following by the design of procedures to mitigate the risks - so called contingency procedures. This paper presents a functional framework for automated mission management including contingencies for UAS. The framework is based on behavior trees and can be integrated with popular open source flight control software like PX4 and Ardupilot. Missions can be planned in a graphical interface using building blocks or in a Ground Control Station software like QGroundControl. The planning of contingency procedures is decoupled from the mission planning and allows for high modularity. Procedures can easily be added, modified or deleted, which is very important for certification of operation. The functionality of the framework is validated in various simulations, testing a plethora of contingencies and missions. Flight tests are currently conducted. The code needed to use the framework can be found on the website: https://robin-mueller.github.io/auto-apms-guide/.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Müller R. and Bauer M. (2024). Automated Mission Management of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Critical Events in Urban Air Traffic. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO; ISBN 978-989-758-717-7, SciTePress, pages 174-181. DOI: 10.5220/0012951500003822

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco24,
author={Robin Müller and Maximilian Bauer},
title={Automated Mission Management of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Critical Events in Urban Air Traffic},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO},
year={2024},
pages={174-181},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012951500003822},
isbn={978-989-758-717-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 2: ICINCO
TI - Automated Mission Management of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Critical Events in Urban Air Traffic
SN - 978-989-758-717-7
AU - Müller R.
AU - Bauer M.
PY - 2024
SP - 174
EP - 181
DO - 10.5220/0012951500003822
PB - SciTePress