Rotary-wing aircraft terrain-following/terrain-avoidance system development

Abstract

NASA Ames Research Center is conductingresearch to develop an automated Nap-of-the-Earth (NOE) helicopter flight capability for potential application in the U.S. Army light, attack, scout helicopter (LHX) program. achieving this goal, NASA is conducting a terrainfollowing/terrain-avoidance (TF/TA) system concept evaluation using real-time piloted simulation on the vertical motion simulator (VMS) at Ames Research Center. The initial effort for this simulation consisted of optimizing the flightpath generation algorithm with respect to several variable parameters, developing a flightpath controller to precisely position the helicopter along the desired flightpath, and integrating the software for trajectory generation with flightpath control software. tion takes advantage of the lateral maneuvering capability of the aircraft and uses local terrain features for optimal terrain masking during low level (contour) flight. A math model of a an 18,000-lb-class helicopter, a digital terrain database, the trajectory generation software, and the flightpath controller were all combined to produce an off-line computer simulation of the complete TF/TA system. This simulation will provide data to optimize the system and evaluate its feasibility in preparation for the real-time piloted simulation on the VMS. Initial results indicate that the system is satisfactory for automatic, low level TF/TA helicopter flight. As a step towardThe TF/TA flightpath computa-

Terrain-Following Motion of an Autonomous Agent as Means of Motion Planning in the Unknown Environment

“…reaching the goal position), and subsequent loss of ability to fulfill it 27,31 . Goal vector is recomputed for every time step, and agent's sensor is always oriented toward the goal as described further in this paper.…”