Mission formalism for UAS based navaid flight inspections

Abstract

In previous work UAS have been proposed as the platform of choice for performing Navaid Flight Inspections. It is expected that the use of these platforms will significantly reduce time and monetary costs, but a number of issues must be addressed for UAS to become a real alternative. An important requirement for flight inspection missions is to minimize their impact on other air traffic. In this paper we focus on provisioning UAS with a level of operational agility comparable to that provided by a human on-board pilot. To avoid conflicts, the unmanned vehicle must be able to momentarily interrupt and later on resume the inspection operations in an automated manner. In this paper we analyze the operational requirements for a specific inspection mission and design a flight plan for its execution. Afterwards, a flight plan specification formalism, that will enable us to perform the inspection mission in a highly automated manner, is presented. Finally, we demonstrate how the flight plan design is translated to a suitable representation using this formalism and how the required operational agility is achieved.