LiDAR-Supported Emergency Landing System for AAM Vehicles (LELSA)

With the rise of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), future vehicles and operations will present a wide variety of new safety issues as well as require new approaches to address long-standing issues that have, to date, been handled by well-trained human pilots. Among the most important is the ability to safely conduct an emergency landing. The LiDAR-supported Emergency Landing System for AAM (LELSA) emulates the perception, cognition, and decision making of expert operators to provide an onboard capability for crewed and uncrewed aircraft to accomplish the complex emergency (precautionary or forced) landing task.This LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) enhanced emergency landing system leverages both existing data and data acquired through in-flight perception to: (1) locate potential emergency landing sites; (2) continuously generate precautionary and forced landing plans that maximize both the quality of ldquo;right nowrdquo; site assessment updates and the likelihood of a safe landing; (3) continuously update its on-board site assessments based on perception data (newly acquired knowledge); and (4) provide emergency flight plan information to the existing on-board flight computer.nbsp; LELSA is designed to support and assist pilots through the emergency landing task and readily extends to fully autonomous operations.The overarching program goal is to demonstrate, in-flight, an intelligent AAM emergency landing system enhanced through multi-objective planning and knowledge acquisition (site assessment) to maximize the likelihood of locating and confirming a safe emergency landing site.