Intelligent Health and Mission Management for Multicopter UAS Integrity Assurance

This paper presents a framework for the implementation of an Intelligent Health and Mission Management system within a multicopter Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) architecture. The proposed system comprised of several fault models capable of detecting and predicting faults that affect mission and safety critical subsystems. In doing so, it provides improved integrity assurance and augments health management capabilities that allow real-time avoidance of critical flight conditions and fast recovery, or at the very least, graceful degradation of safety-critical systems with minimal damage to equipment and risk of human injury. In particular, the faults affecting the command and communication link between the UAS and the ground control station, along with their root causes and pathways, were investigated as this is a single point of failure for any mission. Different artificial intelligence techniques were used to diagnose the faults that were simulated in this study. The benefits of the opportune implementation of this technology include increased integrity, reliability and availability of the multicopter UAS.