When accidents happen, drones weigh their options

Date:
September 27, 2021
Source:
University of Illinois Grainger College of Engineering
Summary:
Flying cars, drones, and other urban aerial mobility vehicles have
real potential to provide efficient transportation and delivery
solutions, but what happens if a drone delivering cheeseburgers
breaks down over a city park or in the middle of a crowded
street? Researchers developed a method to measure vehicles'
ability to recover and complete its mission safely.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Flying cars, drones, and other urban aerial mobility vehicles have real potential to provide efficient transportation and delivery solutions,
but what happens if a drone delivering cheeseburgers breaks down over
a city park or in the middle of a crowded street? Researchers at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a method to measure
vehicles' ability to recover and complete its mission safely.


========================================================================== "Engineers build a lot of redundancy into every system, because failure
is not an option when it comes to ensuring safety," said Melkior Ornik, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Illinois. "When accidents do happen, the vehicle's system requires a sort of rapid,
real-time replanning to continue its mission or, less ideal, figure out a
safe alternative mission. For example, the malfunctioning drone may not be
able to reach its destination, but it has enough power to avoid a highly populated area and crash in an empty field instead." Ornik developed a
notion he calls quantitative resilience of a control system which tries
to establish the capabilities of a system after it experiences an adverse event. One scenario examined the ability to recover from the loss of an actuator -- when an engine, rudder or other part gets damaged and you
no longer have control over a portion of your system.

"The other cases looked at situations in which all of the actuators
still work, but not at full power," Ornik said. "Say, you're driving
your car and suddenly you can only turn your steering wheel a quarter of
the way around, not all the way. We're trying to establish how to still
control the system as safely as possible after such a thing happens."
Ornik said computing quantitative resilience is a complex task as it
requires solving four nested, possibly nonlinear, optimization problems.

"The main technical contribution of this work is that we provided an
e?cient method to compute quantitative resilience," he said. "Relying
on control theory and on two novel geometric results we reduce the
computation of quantitative resilience to a single linear optimization problem." Part of the project was an industrial collaboration with
Bihrle Applied Research, Inc. "This was my first experience with this
type of collaborative effort. Bihrle is an aerospace company interested
in tools to ensure safety of aircraft and urban aerial vehicle and be
prepared for when something bad happens. This ability to work through
when equipment malfunctions has real life implications." Bihrle produced
a video about the project.

The work was supported in part by United States Air Force Research
Laboratory, as well as an Early Stage Innovations grant from NASA's
Space Technology Research Grants Program.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Illinois_Grainger_College_of_Engineering.

Original written by Debra Levey Larson. Note: Content may be edited for
style and length.


========================================================================== Journal References:
1. Jean-Baptiste Bouvier, Kathleen Xu, Melkior Ornik. Quantitative
Resilience of Linear Driftless Systems. Society of Industrial and
Applied Mathematics' 2021 Proceedings of the Conference on Control
and its Applications, 2021 DOI: 10.1137/1.9781611976847.5
2. Hamza El-Kebir, Melkior Ornik. Online Inner Approximation of
Reachable
Sets of Nonlinear Systems with Diminished Control Authority. Society
of Industrial and Applied Mathematics' 2021 Proceedings of
the Conference on Control and its Applications, 2021 DOI:
10.1137/1.9781611976847.2 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/09/210927110502.htm

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