One of the overarching goals of the NASA Airspace Operations and Safety Program (AOSP) is to improve aircraft safety as the NextGen Air Transportation System matures. As loss of control accounts for a significant percentage of the fatal accident rate, developing systems that improve the response to upset conditions in flight are critical to achieving this goal. This research addresses three of the top challenges for the AOSP including: (1) the Airspace Technology Demonstrations (ATD) Project area of Technologies for Assuring Safe Aircraft Energy and Attitude State (TASEAS), (2) the Real-Time System-Wide Safety Assurance (RSSA) area of "reducing flight risk in areas of attitude and energy aircraft state awareness", and (3), with direct application to autonomous recovery, the Safe Autonomous Systems Operation (SASO) Project. The DAGUR system provides robust recoveries for nominal and impaired aircraft as well as robust performance in the face of variations in pilot behavior (Challenges 1 and 2). The provided closed-loop guidance is equally applicable to autonomous vehicle upset recovery (Challenge 3). The immediate application for the proposed technology is in the civilian aerospace sector to improve aviation safety and security. However, the technology will readily extend to military aviation and space exploration. The increasing prevalence of autonomous and remotely-piloted UAVs for military and homeland security applications, their consideration for terrestrial science missions and planetary exploration in the near-to-mid term, and the likely ubiquitous commercial roles of these vehicles in the longer-term, provide numerous opportunities for the transition of the proposed SBIR technologies. Application potential is not limited to the aerospace industry, but is extensible to all systems where a human operator can be assisted by an automated agent or where an autonomous system could benefit from an on-board upset recovery solution.
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