Assurance for Uncertain Systems via Robust Estimation

Barron Associates, Inc. (Barron) proposes to develop and commercialize the Assurance for Uncertain Systems via Robust Estimation (ASSURE) system. The solution focuses on utilizing existing sensors to estimate aircraft states in real time while in-flight, which could lower the number of redundant sensors, lower the likelihood of mission abort, and/or increase pilot situational awareness. By addressing this goal, a system could increase the safety of existing aircraft that have redundancy while also enabling operation of smaller and cost-constrained aircraft that may not possess redundant systems. Such aircraft may not have high-fidelity models typically found in modern commercial aircraft but lower-fidelity approximates with increased uncertainty. ASSURE addresses these situations with a novel estimation scheme based on a generalized polynomial chaos Kalman filter (gPC-KF) that explicitly accounts for uncertainties and noise with arbitrary distributions in nonlinear systems. The gPC-KF utilizes a similar predictor-corrector form found in the Kalman filter but represents the system response using probabilistic machine learning gPC methods. The gPC-KF is not constrained to assumptions of linearity, or weak nonlinearity, and additive Gaussian noise found in the family of Kalman filter estimators. In most realworld systems, these assumptions are violated to a greater or lesser degree, requiring tuning to achieve satisfactory performance which may reduce robustness and filter stability. The gPC approach is not hindered by these assumptions and enables accurate modeling of complex nonlinear, or linear, systems with mixed uncertainty and noise distributions to a defined-level of accuracy. There are numerous applications targeting military and commercial markets, including piloted aircraft, remotely-piloted and UAS aircraft, AAM applications, sUAS used for package delivery, inspection, wildlife monitoring, or counter-UAS. ASSURE is applicable to dynamical systems such as ground and marine vehicles.