Automated Threat Avoidance with 4-D Trajectory Replanning in Resource-Constrained Cockpits

Abstract

Military aircraft equipped with tactical data links and onboard sensors can receive information about pop-up threats, such as surface-to-air missiles and storm cells, which can put the safety of the aircraft in jeopardy. Pilots currently need to mentally combine hazard information from various sources to determine whether these hazards will endanger the safety of the aircraft. If an avoidance maneuver is required, preferably at standoff ranges so that a less-drastic evasive maneuver can be used, pilots also need to decide what necessary maneuver should be performed to avoid these potential hazards as well as terrain and surrounding traffic. This paper presents a 4-D trajectory replanning algorithm that can operate very efficiently in cockpits with limited computational resources to automate the threat avoidance task. A layered approach is used by the proposed algorithm to transform the long-range pathplanning problem that is NP-hard into a problem that can be solved rapidly in embedded computational environments. In addition, the generated flight path is flyable and compatible with onboard flight-management systems to enable the automatic loading of a modified flight plan. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated with a high-fidelity flight-deck simulator for operationally relevant scenarios.