The concept of reliability and safety in UAVs is crucial. Sometimes, operations with unmanned aircrafts require the UAV to perform a “Go Home” maneuver with either, autonomous or manual, activation. Main causes for requiring this maneuver are: operator work overload due to managing multiple UAVs at the same time, an emergency, environmental or external to the operation causes, etc… this issue is controlled satisfactorily with the integration of Veronte Autopilot.
Veronte Autopilot and the safety in UAVs
In order to accomplish with requirements for safety in UAVs, Veronte Autopilot has the possibility to activate automatic events to perform a “Go Home” action. These events may be triggered by various kind of events, as might be: the loss of radiolink, low battery or low fuel detection, an elevated temperature in the engine, the flight out aircraft envelope,… Besides being able to configure the activation on a specific value or range of values in any of the sensors connected to the system.
Once activated this measure of safety in UAVs, a “Go Home” action is made. Thanks to the advanced functions in Veronte, this “Go Home” can be produced autonomously and safely, without having to define a safe route by the operator. Veronte Autopilot includes GNC (Guidance Navigation and Control) algorithms to define the optimal tracing for the minimization of the path avoiding terrain and obstacles, which will improve the performance of the unmanned aircraft both in time and energy, and therefore, increasing safety.
To create this tracing Veronte Autopilot performs calculations to autonomously “Go Home”, avoiding dangers and collisions thereby improving safety in UAVs. Thanks to the DEM (Digital Elevation Model) embedded in Veronte, it is possible to configure a minimum altitude of flight relative to the DEM, thereby “Go Home” is performed with a fixed height over the ground or sea level, avoiding in all moment that the aircraft gets closer than allowed to the ground, mountains, hills,…
In addition to the security measures related to the distance to the DEM, there may be obstacles not defined on the digital elevation model, such as: electrical towers, leafy areas, windmills, buildings, etc… to avoid these obstacles, the user can identify them on the map, to improve the safety in UAVs, it will avoid flying over them both during the autonomous mission as during the automatic “Go Home”.