Aerospace Engineering PhD Candidate: Pedro Donato, Dissertation Chair: Professor Ella Atkins

Increasingly autonomous (IA) systems support aircraft flight crews and enable unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to perform all tasks required for safe emergency landing. This dissertation develops autonomous path planning, emergency landing site identification, and risk assessment capabilities applicable to manned and unmanned aviation. The first contribution is to extend existing methods in geometric flight planning to increase the range of an airplane following total loss-of-thrust. A safety-prioritized emergency flight planner considers path feasibility and aircraft envelope to maximize the ability of the aircraft to execute the emergency landing safely. Optimal control is also investigated as an alternative approach for emergency landing planning. Geometric path planners are adapted to exploit feasible transition graphs generated using recoverable sets and reference governors theory. Data from sources not previously explored are exploited for optimal emergency landing site selection and approach planning. A method is proposed to identify and assess the risk of road segments and other obstacle-free areas to serve as emergency landing fields. Census and real-time mobile phone data generate the real-time occupancy map used to assess flight path risk. Case studies, some based on published accident reports, illustrate and validate in simulation the mathematical and algorithmic methods presented in this dissertation.

Dissertation Committee:

Chair: Ella M. Atkins
Cognate Member: Dmitry Berenson
Members: Ilya Kolmanovsky and Dimitra Panagou

Publications:

Journal

• P. F. A. Di Donato and E. M. Atkins. “Evaluating Risk to People and Property for
Aircraft Emergency Landing Planning”. In: Journal of Aerospace Information Systems
14.5 (2017), pp. 259–278. DOI 10.2514/1.I010513

• P. F. A. Di Donato and E. M. Atkins. “Optimizing Steady Turns for Gliding Trajectories”. In: Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics 39.12 (Dec. 2016), pp. 2627–2637. DOI 10.2514/1.G000319

• P. F. A. Di Donato et al. “Envelope Aware Flight Management for Loss of Control
Prevention given Rudder Jam”. In: Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics
40 (2017), pp. 1027–1041. DOI: 10.2514/1.G000252


Conference

• P. F. A. Di Donato and E. M. Atkins. “Three-Dimensional Dubins Path Generation, and Following for a UAS Glider”. In: 2017 International Conference on Unmanned
Aircraft Systems, ICUAS 2017. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Publ., 2017

• P. F. A. Di Donato, P. Gaskell, and E. M. Atkins. “Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Project-Based Engineering Education”. In: AIAA Infotech @ Aerospace, AIAA SciTech AIAA-2017-1377. 2017. DOI : 10.2514/6.2017-1377

• P. F. A. Di Donato and E. M. Atkins. “Exploring Non-Aviation Information Sources for Aircraft Emergency Landing Planning”. In: AIAA Infotech @ Aerospace, AIAA SciTech. AIAA-2016-1904. 2016. DOI: 10.2514/6.2016-1904

• P. F. A. Di Donato and E. M. Atkins. “An Off-Runway Emergency Landing Aid for a Small Aircraft Experiencing Loss of Thrust”. In: AIAA Infotech @ Aerospace, AIAA SciTech. AIAA-2015-1798. 2015. DOI: 10.2514/6.2015-1798


Other
• E. M. Atkins and P. F. Di Donato. “Low-Altitude Rural to Urban Unmanned Aircraft System Operations”. In: Encyclopedia of Aerospace Engineering. Wiley Online Library, 2010. DOI: 10.1002/9780470686652.eae1139