Date of Award

3-26-2015

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

First Advisor

Richard G. Cobb, PhD.

Abstract

The USAF's F-16 Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System (Auto GCAS) uses a single pre-planned roll to wings- level and 5-g pull-up to meet the operational requirements of being both aggressive and timely, meaning that extremely agile avoidance maneuvers will be executed at the last second to avoid the ground. There currently exists no similar Auto GCAS for manned military heavy' aircraft with lower climb performance such as transport, tanker, or bomber aircraft. This research proposes a new optimal control approach to the ground collision avoidance problem for heavy aircraft by mapping the aggressive and timely requirements of the automatic recovery to an optimal control formulation which includes lateral maneuvers around terrain. Results are presented for representative heavy aircraft scenarios against 3-D digital terrain, which are then compared to a Multi-Trajectory Auto GCAS with five pre-planned maneuvers. Metrics were developed to quantify the improvement from using an optimal approach versus the pre-planned maneuvers. The research results provide a basis to evaluate the expected performance of any future Auto GCAS for all aircraft.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-ENY-DS-15-M-002

DTIC Accession Number

ADA618503

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