Environment–Vehicle Interaction Modeling for Unmanned Aerial System Operations in Complex Airflow Environments

115 INTRODUCTION Today’s war fighters must face their adversaries within a constantly changing and challenging battlefield environment. To help counteract these new threats, our military is deploying ever-increasing numbers of unmanned xisting unmanned aerial system (UAS) platforms do not perform well in environments with complex terrain and highly variable aero dynamics. However, it is essential that the war fighter operate UASs in such complex environments (e.g., urban areas, canyons, and mountains). Thus, a need exists for a high-fidelity, physics-based modeling and simulation framework addressing this parameter space. The APL UAS mission planning and simulation tool provides the framework to perform environment–vehicle interaction studies. The framework includes computational fluid dynamics modeling of the complex terrain airflows, vehicle aero dynamics and dynamics models, terrain models, and a visualization engine. This article focuses on development, formulation, and implementation, within this framework, of environment–vehicle interaction models for UAS operations in complex environments. Results for implementation of one environment–vehicle interaction model show the effects on the trajectory (e.g., latitude, longitude, altitude, vehicle attitude, vehicle rates, and autopilot control commands). Examination of such results helps understand the effects of these interaction models in the context of validated terrain airflow models in realistic complex environments. The APL UAS mission planning and simulation tool provides a compelling synthetic environment in which to perform these environment– vehicle interaction studies that includes relevant operational constraints to increase the probability of mission success for UAS operations in these complex environments. Environment–Vehicle Interaction Modeling for Unmanned Aerial System Operations in Complex Airflow Environments