Any-Time Trajectory Planning for Safe Emergency Landing

Loss of thrust is a critical situation for human pilots of fixed-wing aircraft which force them to select a landing site in the nearby range and perform an emergency landing. The time for the landing site selection is limited by the actual altitude of the aircraft, and it may be fatal if the correct decision is not chosen fast enough. Therefore, we propose a novel RRT* -based planning algorithm for finding the safest emergency landing trajectory towards a given set of possible landing sites. Multiple landing sites are evaluated simultaneously during the flight even before any mechanical issue occurs, and the roadmap of possible landing trajectories is updated permanently. Thus, the proposed algorithm has the any-time property and provides the best emergency landing trajectory almost instantly.