Conceptual Architecture for Remotely Piloted Operation Mode in Commercial Aircraft

With the increasing civil aviation passengers and the rapid development of aviation logistics,the study on remotely piloted operation(RPO)mode has received extensive attention.RPO mode constructs the piloting decisionmaking mode which involves the tripartite collaboration among airborne automatic/autonomous system,remote ground-based crews and air traffic control.In this paper,we describe the organizing architecture for commercial remotely piloted aircraft(CRPA)system and its components.Compared with the current operation mode,the new air-ground collaborative decision-making mode has been established with six different situations based on the type of the flight and the condition of the remote pilot.Taking airport surface operation as an experimental example,we model the airport surface operation process and compare the advantages and disadvantages between RPO mode and the current dual-pilot mode from the perspectives of time and operation coverage,and draw conclusions that RPO mode can basically cover the flight operations of the dual-pilot,improve the accuracy of pilot operations and greatly reduce response time by 48%in pre-flight inspection.The above research would be the foundation for the RPO development of commercial aircraft in China.

Digital virtual flight testing and evaluation method for flight characteristics airworthiness compliance of civil aircraft based on HQRM

In order to incorporate airworthiness requirements for flight characteristics into the entire development cycle of electronic flight control system（EFCS） equipped civil aircraft, digital virtual flight testing and evaluation method based on handling qualities rating method（HQRM）is proposed. First, according to HQRM, flight characteristics airworthiness requirements of civil aircraft in EFCS failure states are determined. On this basis, digital virtual flight testing model,comprising flight task digitized model, pilot controlling model, aircraft motion and atmospheric turbulence model, is used to simulate the realistic process of a pilot controlling an airplane to perform assigned flight tasks. According to the simulation results, flight characteristics airworthiness compliance of the airplane can be evaluated relying on the relevant regulations for handling qualities（HQ） rating. Finally, this method is applied to a type of passenger airplane in a typical EFCS failure state, and preliminary conclusions concerning airworthiness compliance are derived quickly. The research results of this manuscript can provide important theoretical reference for EFCS design and actual airworthiness compliance verification of civil aircraft.

Automatic detection and evaluation of sugarcane planting rows in aerial images

Sugarcane planting is an important and growing activity in Brazil.Thereupon,several techniques have been developed over the years to maximize crop productivity and profit,amongst them,processing of sugarcane field images.In this sense,this research aims to identify and analyze crop rows and measure their gaps from aerial images of sugarcane fields.For this,a small Remotely Piloted Aircraft captured the images,generating orthomosaics of the areas for analysis.Then,each orthomosaic is classified with the K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm to segment regions of interest.Planting row orientation is estimated using the RGB gradient filter.Morphological operations and computational geometry models are then used to detect and map rows and gaps along the planting row segment.To evaluate the results,crop rows are mapped and compared to manually taken measurements.Our technique obtained an error smaller than 2%when compared to gap length in crop rows from an orthomosaic with the area of 8.05 ha(ha).The proposed approach can map the positioning of the automatically generated row segments appropriately onto manually created segments.Moreover,our method also achieved similar results when confronted with a manual technique for differing growth stages(40 and 80 days after harvest)of the sugarcane crop.The proposed method presents a great potential to be adopted in sugarcane planting monitoring。