Applications of Formal Languages to Management of Manned and Unmanned Aircraft

Drone Mission Definition and Implementation for Automated Infrastructure Inspection Using Airborne Sensors

“…This translation makes use of predefined flight patterns summarising flight operational behaviour, and also takes into account the on-board sensors features, to define the time intervals where the drone has to remain still on specific coordinates to complete the measurement schedule. The instructions are defined in a QR-AIDL inspired manner [ 69 ], and they are not drone specific. This sequence of instructions is sent to the Trajectory Integration Engine in order to obtain the sampled trajectory.…”

“…To do so the Flight Plan is decomposed in simpler elements capable of simulating the flight along legs joining consecutive waypoints. Keeping the original idea of the QR-AIDL [ 69 ], we denoted those simpler elements instructions . Instructions are defined through physical laws that allow to model the drone movement, completed with an end condition (for instance, arriving to a given position or reaching a defined speed).…”

“…With these equations, each of the previously explained physical laws are integrated obtaining a trajectory prediction for the Flight Plan. A full study of the effect of the constraints is made in [ 69 ]. In our case we constraint the problem defining the flights by the following QR-AIDL instructions: horizontal speed law (implementing horizontal accelerations, horizontal decelerations and constant horizontal velocity), vertical speed law (implementing vertical accelerations, vertical decelerations and constant vertical speed), 3D speed law (implementing oblique accelerations, oblique decelerations and constant oblique speed) and yaw law (implementing yaw turns).…”

“…Other types of mission planner are presented in [ 67 ], where the mission is recalculated in real time but again it is oriented to obtain a path to a non-static target, and in [ 68 ], specifically for pick up from the warehouse to the production line until the final product is delivered to the client. In [ 60 ] it is also described the flight plan definition problem as a concatenation of legs joining waypoints, which is not cost effective for typical systematic infrastructure inspection flights, and [ 69 ] describes a complete language hierarchy and associated calculation engines, mainly devoted to the lower levels of the trajectory prediction problem for commercial aircraft and also for multi-rotors.…”