Development of Occupant-Preferred Landing Profiles for Personal Aerial Vehicles

With recent increased interest in autonomous vehicles and the associated technology, the prospect of realizing a personal aerial vehicle seems closer than ever. However, there is likely to be a continued requirement for any occupant of an air vehicle to be comfortable with both the automated portions of the flight and their ability to take manual control as and when required. This paper, using the approach to landing as an example maneuver, examines what a comfortable trajectory for personal aerial vehicle occupants might look like. Based upon simulated flight data, a “natural” flight trajectory is designed and then compared to constant deceleration and constant optic flow descent profiles. It is found that personal aerial vehicle occupants with limited flight training and no artificial guidance follow the same longitudinal trajectory as has been found for professionally trained helicopter pilots. Further, the final stages of the approach to hover can be well described using the Tau theory. For automatic ...