Directional Flight Envelope Prediction based on Convex Optimization

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-1398.vid Flight envelope information is essential to flight safety. This paper presents a new method to predict the flight envelope and perform online safety monitoring, where the flight envelope is represented by the reachable set. The proposed method formulates an optimal control problem to determine, in a specific direction, the boundary point of the reachable set. This optimal control problem is then solved using a convex-optimization-based framework in a computationally efficient manner. Based on this efficient boundary point determination method, we propose a strategy to predict local flight envelopes in some critical directions online. Meanwhile, a series of safety monitoring indicators are extracted from the predicted envelope information. Simulation results on a VTOL aircraft model show that the method can effectively estimate local flight envelopes, generate the safety indicators online, and address the impact of failure in time.