Trajectory Planning for Emergency Landing of VTOL Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In recent years, inspired by technological progress and the outstanding performance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in several local wars, the UAV industry has witnessed explosive development, widely used in communication relay, logistics, surveying and mapping, patrol, surveillance, and other fields. Vertical Take-Off and Landing fixed-wing UAV has both the advantages of vertical take-off and landing of rotorcraft and the advantages of long endurance of fixed-wing UAV, which broadened its application field and is the most popular UAV at present. Recently, fixed-wing UAV failure analysis highlights that cruise engine shutdown is the most common reason for emergency landing, which is also a governing factor for Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) fixed-wing UAV failures. Nevertheless, the emergency landing trajectory of the latter UAV type after engine shutdown is different from that of the conventional fixed-wing UAVs due to the VTOL power system. Hence, spurred by the requirement of a safe emergency landing trajectory for VTOL fixed-wing UAVs, this paper develops an architecture capable of safe emergency landing for such platforms. The suggested method develops a particle dynamics model of the VTOL UAV and analyzes its aerodynamic characteristics utilizing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) results. The UAV’s trajectory is divided into three parts for enhanced planning. For the guidance stage, the initial position and heading angle are arbitrary. Hence, the Dubins shortest cross-range and the fastest descent trajectory are adopted to steer the UAV above the landing window quickly. The spiral stage comprises a conical and cylindrical part combined with a spiral descent trajectory of variable radius for energy management and landing course alignment. Given the limited energy storage of VTOL power systems, the landing stage exploits an optimal control trajectory problem solved by a Gaussian pseudospectral method, involving trajectory conventional landing planning, unpowered landing, distance optimal landing, and wind-resistant landing. All trajectories meet the dynamics constraints, terminal constraints, and sliding performance constraints and cover both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional trajectories. A large number of simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed trajectories manage broad applicability and strong feasibility for VTOL fixed-wing UAVs.