Hardware Demonstration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Upset Recovery

For manned aircraft, loss of control during flight is a major cause for aviation accidents; for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the dangers associated with upset recovery are greater due to (a) the increased likelihood that a smaller aircraft will experience an upset in the first place, and (b) the need to autonomously generate recovery commands. In the Phase I, the authors demonstrated a conceptual automated recovery system that (1) allows UAVs to adopt/encode the best-practices from the manned aircraft community, (2) uses a combination of inner-loop and outer-loop (autopilot) algorithms to return to stable flight; (3) can be used early on during the onset of an upset to quickly recover stable flight before a more serious upset condition occurs, (4) is applicable across a wide variety of UAV platforms, and (5) can take advantage of innovative actuation concepts if available. In Phase II, the authors propose an aggressive program to mature the technology and demonstrate it in actual flight tests. The issue and the proposed solution approach are of such interest to NASA, that the team anticipates significant NASA support for the program at no cost to the Navy or the SBIR office.