China
Africa
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Parachutes and Parafoils in Agricultural Crop Production
Published in K. R. Krishna, Aerial Robotics in Agriculture, 2021
Parachutes have been used extensively for airdrop of personnel and cargo, by the military establishments of different nations and humanitarian agencies. As stated earlier, the two most common types of parachutes used are round parachutes and rectangular shaped parafoils. The circular parachutes capture air and that provides a drag force to decelerate a payload and achieve steady descent velocity. The latter, i.e., parafoil, by virtue of its design with air inflated air-foil shaped cells, provides a lift force as well as a drag force. Therefore, parafoils can be steered to deliver payloads accurately, on the ground. Based on this capability, parafoils are currently actively pursued by the military for precision aerial delivery of cargos. The development and introduction of ram-air parachute (parafoil) with facility to steer it and control its rate of descent is an important event. It induced great interest in cargo transport and airdrop. Further, during recent years, GPS-guided transport using sophisticated electronic and computer-based commands has allowed for greater accuracy, Particularly, during airdrop and landing of parafoils (Yakimenko, 2016). It has been forecasted, that, in due course, precision air drop of large cargo using autonomous parafoils may become common.
The Importance of Crew Resource Management Behaviors in Mission Performance: Implications for Training Evaluation
Published in R. Key Dismukes, Human Error in Aviation, 2017
Robert T. Nullmeyer, V. Alan Spiker
The more detailed CRM-performance correlations reported in Table 1 suggest that some CRM elements are more central than others for effective performance during individual mission phases. For example, the diversity and complexity of activities involving multiple crew members during low-level flight create a high value for allocating crew member functions wisely during this phase. Time and accuracy are the two criteria used to measure performance during the airdrop mission phase. It is therefore not surprising that time management emerged as an important factor. Crews who excelled at this task called drop warnings and executed associated checklists in a timely fashion. The threat environment in this scenario rewarded crews who had focused on the tactical considerations associated with the planned air refueling track and maintained situational awareness during this phase of the mission. Infil/exfil required crews to integrate multiple information sources (e.g., intelligence reports on changing threats and the various parties on the ground), and like airdrop, the crew must reconfigure the airplane, run multiple checklists, and incorporate multiple crew member perspectives. Strong situational awareness and time management skills differentiated the most effective crews from the others.
Dynamic modelling of parafoil system based on aerodynamic coefficients identification
Published in Automatika, 2023
Ligan Zhao, Jin Tao, Hao Sun, Qinglin Sun
Simulation is an efficient and essential way to study the characteristics of the plant before practical experienment. Ward and Costello [49] presented the development of a control law to implement glide slope control on an autonomous airdrop system, and demonstrated an improvement in landing accuracy by simulation and flight test. Tao et al. [50] designed the guidance law based on the hybrid approach that combines the cross-track error and the line of sight, which was simulated in a semi-physical simulation platform. Chen et al. [51] developed the guidance by modern multi-objective evolutionary algorithms without assuming any predefined trajectories, and adopted the software developed with Kotlin, Java and JavaFX to implement solution. In addition, Zhang et al. [10] carried out the simulation of motion during the flight, and Farì and Grande [52] implemented the dynamic models and G&C algorithms in the MATLAB/Simulink and Dymola environments. In this paper, a MATLAB code has been utilized to simulate the 6-DOF model, and the flowchart of the algorithm is presented in Figure 7.
Integrated Modeling of Fatigue Impacts on C-17 Approach and Landing Performance
Published in The International Journal of Aerospace Psychology, 2023
Bella Z. Veksler, Megan B. Morris, Michael A. Krusmark, Glenn Gunzelmann
One example of how biomathematical models have been utilized for FRM is U.S. Air Force, Air Mobility Command C-17 operations. The C-17 Globemaster III is a cargo aircraft that is used to transport equipment and personnel, and perform tactical airdrop and airlift missions. Because of the unique characteristics of their operational mission (e.g., crossing multiple time zones, long duty days, varying start times, etc.) and the need to support operations 24/7, these mobility pilots and aircrew are especially susceptible to fatigue. Similar fatigue outcomes have been found with other aircrew with comparable flight characteristics, such as international commercial airline pilots (Petrilli et al., 2006; Samel et al., 1995). Currently, Air Mobility Command’s risk management program uses a scheduling tool (Hursh, Balkin et al., 2004) that utilizes the SAFTE model to generate Mission Effectiveness graphs (see, Figure 1). This scheduling tool is used to develop mission plans that balance fatigue with operational needs and recommend sleep schedules for aircrew based on mission information (e.g., flight leg start and end times, time zones, light).
In-flight wind identification and soft landing control for autonomous unmanned powered parafoils
Published in International Journal of Systems Science, 2018
Shuzhen Luo, Panlong Tan, Qinglin Sun, Wannan Wu, Haowen Luo, Zengqiang Chen
Because the powered parafoil system includes thrust equipment and the parafoil-payload system, the available sensors are separated from the canopy by a complex network of flexible rigging, so that the system is very sensitive to wind and turbulence and will exhibit a high degree of variability from the flight. If the system has only a single GPS module to require the real wind information, this is desirable to reduce cost and complexity. In contrast to previous methods, considering the dynamic characteristic of autonomous powered parafoil systems in the wind field, our proposed method is divided into several processes as follows. The first procedure is to obtain the groundspeed and direction of the powered parafoil system by utilizing the GPS sampling data. Second, the novel linear extended state observation filter (LESF) can be designed to improve the identification accuracy by removing the measurement noise. Comparison experiments with filtering effect are constructed. According to the relationship between the groundspeed of the system and wind velocity, the recursive least square method is employed to identify the wind speed and direction. Eventually, extensive results of simulation experiments and actual airdrop tests demonstrate that the in-flight wind identification algorithm can identify the variable wind field with a high identification accuracy, and it can further benefit the realization of the terminal soft landing and accurate trajectory tracking control with applying this wind identification method. This is highly advantageous in streaming the development cycle of autonomous powered parafoil systems.