Emergency Landing Decision Method for Unmanned Aircraft

This paper describes a framework to generate a computationally low-cost decision function to automate emergency landings for drones. Specifically, this function makes a choice of which is the most suitable location to land an unmanned aircraft from a given list of candidate ground locations. The candidate ground locations are described by a distance metric from the aircraft to the landing location and by a probability safety measure associated to how safe it is to land in that particular location. In addition, an urgency level, associated with the current healthy status of the unmanned aircraft, and a tuning parameter that models its robustness are included in the decision function. These four parameters are assumed to be given and to have some particular properties, which are described further in the paper.