Risk identification and management for safe UAS operation

Abstract

Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) have numerous applications. Commercial potential in particular will not be realized until a comprehensive strategy is developed for safely and fully integrating UAS into an airspace currently dominated by commercial transport operations. This paper overviews a challenging benchmark application, on-demand surveillance over a densely-populated urban region, then presents a spectrum of risks that might be encountered. We describe novel risk mitigation criteria for small UAS that focus not on vehicle preservation but instead on minimizing risk of harm to people and property on the ground as well as to higher-value airborne assets. We conclude with a case study in which wind shear and turbulence in an urban canyon require a small UAS to execute an unplanned landing.

Emergency Flight Planning for an Energy-Constrained Multicopter

“…Also added to the list of candidate landing sites is a list of latitude/longitude locations of rooftops suitable for landing. 2 The minimum cost per cell is C goal ; all cells traveled by the UAS must cost more that C goal , or the UAS would consider them a landing location. This heuristic is theoretically admissible in all situations, and therefore allows the emergency path planner to provide the lowest cost path.…”

“…Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) are expected to experience a period of significant growth as regulatory policy supports them in the coming years [2,12,19,25]. Many applications such as infrastructure inspection, law enforcement, and package delivery all require the UAS to fly over and within populated areas.…”

A Modeling, Simulation and Control Framework for Small Unmanned Multicopter Platforms in Urban Environments

“…Unfortunately, the regulatory frameworks for allowing these operations are not yet in place. These regulations must establish an acceptable risk posture and assurance of safety for all stakeholders involved [7][8][9][10] . Urban environments pose a significant number of challenges towards concepts allowing safe and routine access to this airspace for unmanned aircraft, particularly in the small to medium-size UAS categories.…”

Geometric Control of Quadrotor Attitude in Wind With Flow Sensing and Thrust Constraints

“…This paper employs a feedback linearization controller on the Quadrotors are able to accomplish an array of tasks such as surveying farmland and aiding in natural disasters [12] that require multi-rotor aircraft to fly outdoors in potentially adverse weather. High winds pose a challenge to small UAS [13][14][15], and developing an understanding of how they respond to wind and the mechanics behind that response is key to compensation. This paper builds on previous work [16] in order to incorporate flow sensing in the attitude controller of a three-degree-of-freedom (DOF) quadrotor test stand.…”