School of Mechanical Engineering David Alkaher
School of Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Wednesday, November 14, 2018 at 14:00
Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering, Room 206
Pareto-based Safe Aerial Navigation in the Presence of Medium-Range Energy Bleeding Missile
David Alkaher Ph.D. Student
Tactical-flight scenarios of modern combat-aircrafts are often executed in the presence of air-to-air or ground-to-air missile threats. One such scenario, deals with a navigating aircraft that aims to intercept a non-aggressive adversary aircraft, in the presence of an energy-bleeding coasting-missile that was or is launched towards the navigating aircraft. When the adversary missile is detected, the pilot is faced with a tradeoff between minimizing the distance to the target and maximizing the closest-approach from the threatening missile. Clearly, a combat pilot must take risks and be courageous. Yet, there is a fine-line between taking a rational risk and taking a hasty gamble. The main goal of the discussed thesis is to support the pilot decision by providing real-time satisficing set of solutions to the aforementioned navigation problem, which guarantee the pilot’s safety.
The solution is based on a proposed concept of a Dynamic Escape Zone (DEZ), which results in a novel real-time aid for the aircrew to decide when to commence the latest yet safe-kinetic-evasion (i.e., missile outrunning), from an already launched missile. Such safe-evasion is based on exhausting the energy of the adversary missile to avoid missile rendezvous. While not claiming to find the Pareto-optimal solutions, the proposed approach provides satisficing solutions. Using simulations, it is shown that the obtained set of controllers constitutes a set of non-dominated solutions with generalization characteristics. The obtained solutions are associated with various cautious to courageous behaviors. This allows pilots to choose in real-time a safe-navigation strategy according to their desired behavior by setting a subjective safety-level preference.
