Rockwell Shows Off Self-Healing UAV

Graham Warwick graham_warwick@aviationweek.com

Rockwell Collins plans to demonstrate the autonomous recovery and safe landing of an unmanned aircraft after severe damage to the wing and tail under an extension to its damage-tolerant flight control work with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Under the previous phase, the company demonstrated its flight-control software could recover and land an F/A-18 scale model after 60% of its wing was blown off. "We'll expand on that to show more realistic damage," says David Vos, senior director of control technologies. "We'll take out a big fraction of the wing and horizontal and vertical tails." The system will also demonstrate its ability to recover the aircraft if it flips inverted or enters an extreme nose-down attitude after being damaged. "The onboard system will know the right thing to do even if it's upside down," he says. Development of damage-tolerant flight controls is part of a push to make unmanned aircraft more capable and reliable, so that they can safely share airspace with manned aircraft. Vos says some UAS programs now in competition are interested in the capability, which could lead to damage tolerance being deployed operationally as early as 2010-11 as a feature of the company's Athena UAS flight control system. In the previous phase of the Darpa project, Rockwell Collins' automatic supervisory adaptive control software demonstrated its ability to recover aircraft performance in the roll axis after damage. The new phase will extend this to pitch and yaw for all-axis control. Flight tests are planned for year-end. A new software feature called the emergency mission manager will also be demonstrated. This will allow the damaged aircraft to autonomously select and recover to the nearest airstrip for an emergency landing. A Rockwell Collins video shows a scale model F-18 with most of a wing blown off, flying both with its recovery systems turned off and then on. Commentary by Graham Warwick is available here at the Ares defense technology blog. Photo credit: Rockwell Collins