Reachability as a Unifying Framework for Computing Helicopter Safe Operating Conditions and Autonomous Emergency Landing

Abstract: We present a numeric method to compute the safe operating flight conditions for a helicopter such that we can ensure a safe landing in the event of a partial or total engine failure. The unsafe operating region is the complement of the backwards reachable tube, which can be found as the sub-zero level set of the viscosity solution of a Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) equation. Traditionally, numerical methods used to solve the HJ equation rely on a discrete grid of the solution space and exhibit exponential scaling with dimension, which is problematic for the high-fidelity dynamics models required for accurate helicopter modeling. We avoid the use of spatial grids by formulating a trajectory optimization problem, where the solution at each initial condition can be computed in a computationally efficient manner. The proposed method is shown to compute an autonomous landing trajectory from any operating condition, even in non-cruise flight conditions.