Flight Envelope Prediction via Optimal Control-Based Reachability Analysis

What is it about?

Aircraft loss of control (LOC) is one of the leading causes of accidents and fatalities for all vehicle classes, operating categories, and flight phases. Flight envelope protection (FEP) is an important way to mitigate LOC hazards, which aims to keep the aircraft from exceeding the limit flight envelope. A prerequisite for designing the FEP system is the determination of the envelope boundaries. This work formulates the flight envelope based on reachable sets and proposes two novel algorithms to predict the envelope for a nonlinear flight dynamics model. They realize similar accuracies but fairly significant improvements in terms of computational efficiency compared to existing methods.

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