The present invention provides a system for remote vehicle operation by human pilot and artificial intelligence systems. The system comprises: a vehicle capable of movement, a human operator and control station situated outside of the vehicle in a remote location, a bidirectional wireless communications channel, which transmits commands from the control station to the vehicle and which receives information related to the vehicle's state and its environment from the vehicle, and a human interface device conveying information to the human operator and receiving inputs.

Systems and methods for controlling an aerial vehicle to avoid obstacles are disclosed. A system can detect, based on a world model generated from sensor data captured by one or more sensors positioned on the aerial vehicle during flight, an obstacle for the aerial vehicle, and trigger an augmented manual control mode responsive to a speed of the aerial vehicle being less than a predetermined threshold and detecting the obstacle. The system can set, responsive to triggering the augmented manual control mode, a speed constraint for the aerial vehicle in a direction of the obstacle based on a distance between the aerial vehicle and the obstacle. The system can receive an instruction to navigate the aerial vehicle in the direction at a second speed, and adjust the instruction to replace the second speed with the speed constraint, causing the aerial vehicle to navigate at the speed constraint.

An aircraft position control system that keeps an aircraft at target coordinates in an inertial space with respect to a target landing point that moves includes an acceleration correction processing unit that, based on acceleration of the aircraft and an attitude of the aircraft, outputs first attitude correction acceleration for correcting the acceleration of the aircraft, a complementary filter that, based on the first attitude correction acceleration and inertial velocity of the aircraft, outputs second attitude correction acceleration in which a drift component included in the first attitude correction acceleration is removed, and a smoothing processing unit that, based on the second attitude correction acceleration and relative coordinates between the aircraft and the target landing point, outputs smoothed relative coordinates obtained by smoothing the relative coordinates.

A method, apparatus, system, and computer program product for controlling landing of a vertical landing vehicle. In one illustrative example, a method controls landing of a vertical landing vehicle. A landing profile for landing the vertical landing vehicle is determined by the computer system using a third derivative of a position equation, an initial position, an initial speed, a final speed, and a touchdown point for the vertical landing vehicle. Landing of the vertical landing vehicle is controlled using the landing profile.

Fly-by-wire vehicle systems and related control systems are provided for controlling operation of a vehicle, such as an aircraft. An exemplary method of controlling a vehicle involves identifying an input position associated with actuation of a human-machine interface, identifying a current speed of the vehicle, determining a dynamic zero acceleration reference actuation position for the human-machine interface based at least in part on the current speed, determining an acceleration command for the vehicle based on a relationship between the input actuation position and the dynamic zero acceleration reference actuation position, and providing the acceleration command to a flight control law or other control system configurable to operate one or more actuators associated with the vehicle to influence the current speed of the vehicle in accordance with the acceleration command.

A method carried out by an on-board calculator on a vehicle, including acquiring a set of points at the current time, delivered by a Doppler radar system of the vehicle, acquiring the attitude of the vehicle at the current time, delivered by a vehicle inertial navigation system, orienting the set of points at the current time with respect to a land reference frame taking into account the attitude at the current time, processing the radial speeds of the points to calculate an estimated speed of the vehicle at the current time, calculating a position of the vehicle at the current time from the estimated speed at the current time, and executing a simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm based on the position of the vehicle at the current time over a plurality of successive times.

A navigation system for airborne vehicles without GNSS data uses at least three microphones positioned at or near a base station. The microphones capture sounds emitted by the airborne vehicle and these sounds are processed to calculate the vehicle's location. The vehicle then makes a series of maneuvers in response to the information received from the base station.

When any one of a plurality of first rotors (VTOL rotors) fails, a rotor controller (a VTOL rotor controller) executes thrust increase control for increasing the thrust generated by an adjacent first rotor that is the first rotor adjacent to the failed first rotor, without making the adjacent first rotor cause the thrust variation for vibration suppression control, and executes the vibration suppression control in a manner so that one or more second rotors (VTOL rotors) bear the burden of the thrust variation that has been borne by the adjacent first rotor.

A trajectory tracking control method for the unmanned helicopter based on the filter observer is provided. This method establishes a position system model of the disturbed unmanned helicopter including a lumped disturbance term and a measurement noise term, then, the state vector is constructed based on the actual position and actual speed of the unmanned helicopter, the position system model of the disturbed unmanned helicopter is transformed into the system state equation based on the state vector, according to the system state equation, the filter observer is designed based on the continuous-time Kalman filter, and the composite PID controller is designed for the position system model of the disturbed unmanned helicopter, the trajectory tracking control of the disturbed unmanned helicopter using the composite PID controller combined with the filter observer can perform dynamic real-time feedforward compensation for the lumped disturbance and achieve effective suppression of the measurement noise.

An air-based counter-countermeasure (CCM) system includes an autonomous or semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft capable of deployment to an area of a countermeasure system having (1) a laser detector to receive and identify an incident laser signal as a target designator signal and (2) one or more countermeasure subsystems operative in response to an output of the laser detector to deploy corresponding countermeasures against a laser target designator. The CCM system further includes a laser-based CCM subsystem carried by the aircraft, the CCM subsystem being configured and operative, during the deployment of the aircraft, to direct a simulated target designator laser signal to the laser detector of the countermeasure system to trigger one or more of the countermeasures and thereby reduce protective ability of the countermeasure system against subsequent laser-guided attack.