Results of the pilot assistance system “Assisted Low-Level Flight and Landing on Unprepared Landing Sites” obtained with the ACT/FHS research rotorcraft

The DLR project ALLFlight (Assisted Low-Level Flight and Landing on Unprepared Landing Sites) deals with the development of a helicopter pilot assistance system, to provide pilot assistance during all phases of flight. The research is particularly focused on the landing on unprepared sites in the presence of obstacles and in a degraded visual environment. The goal is to compute a safe flight path in real time that is displayed to the pilot. Several technical components such as a sensor suite to scan the environment, path planning algorithms, head-down and helmet-mounted displays, active inceptors, and the model-based flight control system are set up to form the overall assistance system. Throughout the development, pilot surveys generate requirements to design individual components such as path planning algorithms, or the synthetic view of the helmet-mounted display. Prior surveys accelerate the design and adjustment of the respective components, meaning that the flight tests benefit from well-designed components, minimizing the requirement for further “re-designs”. During ALLFlight, the successfully flight-tested manual landing with path planning and obstacle avoidance in real time for an unknown terrain has been demonstrated. This paper describes each assistance component, the pilot surveys, and the results obtained in almost six years of research.