VISION project summary

The VISION project (Validation of Integrated Safety-enhanced Intelligent flight cONtrol) is an Europe/Japan collaborative research project. To enhance air transport safety, the main objective of VISION is to validate smarter technologies for aircraft Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) by including:

Critical flight situations are targeted, especially during near-ground operation phases (half of the fatal accidents in the last decade during approach or landing). Actually, despite continuous improvements in reliability and performance, the complexity of Flight Control Systems (FCS) also requires to use many information sources likely to suffer from faults and environmental conditions. To overcome these anomalies, recent projects have evaluated advanced solutions, but their transfer to the industry is slowed down by lack of flight validations, limitations of on-board computers or certification issues.

 

The TRL reached during previous projects by both sides are rather equivalent, with dissimilar pros and cons. Accordingly, VISION aims at capitalizing on the know-how and experience independently acquired by European and Japanese partners to make a significant improvement and maturation of the TRL achieved. To demonstrate the solutions, complementary efforts will be undertaken and two scenarios are considered:

during the final approach and landing phases. In the first case, Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) and Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) techniques will be implemented in faulty situations. In the second case, vision will be used to estimate and modify the aircraft glide path when local navigation data is denied, or when unexpected obstacles are detected. In both cases, the GN&C systems will be implemented on real aircraft platforms and their performance evaluated during flight tests, both in Japan and in Europe. VISION will result in flight-validated GN&C solutions with increased TRL, with expected benefits for the European and Japanese aircraft industry.

 

Another important objective of this collaborative framework is to promote research and people exchanges between the European and Japanese universities and research institutes.