Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are being increasingly adopted for various applications. The risk UAS poses to people and property must be kept to acceptable levels. This paper proposes risk-aware contingency management autonomy to prevent an accident in the event of component malfunction, specifically propulsion unit failure and/or battery degradation. The proposed autonomy is modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) whose solution is a contingency management policy that appropriately executes emergency landing, flight termination or continuation of planned flight actions. Motivated by the potential for errors in fault/failure indicators, partial observability of the MDP state space is investigated. The performance of optimal policies is analyzed over varying observability conditions in a high-fidelity simulator. Results indicate that both partially observable MDP (POMDP) and maximum a posteriori MDP policies performed similarly over different state observability criteria, given the nearly deterministic state transition model.

翻译：无人航空系统（UAS）正日益广泛地应用于各类场景。UAS对人员和财产所带来的风险必须控制在可接受水平。本文提出了一种风险感知的应急管理自主性方法，旨在防止因组件故障（特别是推进单元失效和/或电池退化）引发的事故。所提出的自主性模型被建模为马尔可夫决策过程（MDP），其解是一种应急管理策略，可适当地执行紧急着陆、飞行终止或继续执行原定飞行计划。考虑到故障/失效指示器可能存在误差，本文对MDP状态空间的部分可观测性进行了研究。通过高保真模拟器，分析了在不同可观测性条件下最优策略的性能。结果表明，在近乎确定性的状态转移模型下，部分可观测MDP（POMDP）与最大后验MDP策略在不同状态可观测性标准下表现相似。