Determination of reachable flight regions: a zonotopic approach

Abstract

The general problem addressed in this paper is that of the estimation and prediction of the aircraft flight maneuvering envelope. This work is intended to be further used as the basis of a new approach for predictive safe flight envelope monitoring and early notification of developing off-nominal flight situations. The proposed method combines: i) a Zonotopic Kalman Filter (ZKF) to estimate the set of possible states related to the open-loop flight dynamics of an aircraft, ii) reachable tube computations based on a closed-loop model to predict the future evolution of an aircraft over a specified time window and based on some assumptions about future control activities. The reachable tubes over the moving anticipatory temporal window are initialized and computed at each sample time based on the estimated state set resulting from the ZKF prediction/correction observation scheme which takes into account bounded state and measurement uncertainties. The aircraft benchmark CALC (Civilian Aircraft Landing Challenge) jointly proposed by ONERA (French Aerospace lab) and AIRBUS has been used to provide some preliminary simulation results.