Real-time Turbulence Recognition and Reporting System for Unmanned Systems

Atmospheric turbulence is ubiquitous for all manned and unmanned flight vehicles, regardless of vehicle size and speed. Turbulence is generally compensated for by the pilot and flight control system and factors into aircraft design, flight envelope definition, and mission profile. If high-intensity turbulence is encountered, structural damage and/or loss of control can result, leading to mission abort, and in extreme cases, catastrophic failure. For manned aircraft, the turbulence level is pilot-determined based on “feel.” For Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), detection and recognition of turbulence must be performed by other means. The Navy seeks a real-time, robust, low-computational-overhead, on-vehicle system for UAS to recognize and quantify turbulence severity levels. As a solution, we propose the Systems Technology, Inc. Turbulence REcognition AlgorithM (STREAM). STREAM will leverage existing sensors to quantify time-varying turbulence intensity levels in real-time using an efficient onboard frequency-domain-based algorithm that can be seamlessly applied as a software update to existing and future UAS of varying weight and speed class. These data can be sent to a remote operator for better-informed decision making or can be used for autonomous control algorithms on board. STREAM will be developed and demonstrated in Phase I via simulation with relevant UAS models.