Safer Flying Using an Immune-Inspired Adaptive Health Monitoring System

An adaptive health monitoring system or AHMS was developed to improve or add situational awareness to an aircraft, former is for the manned aircraft, and latter is for the unmanned aerial system (UAS). The AHMS provides situational awareness by characterising a notion of health to the aircraft, and uses this health value to perform error detection and error compensation. The notion of health is created by correlating sensors and controller outputs available to the AHMS during flight, and the AHMS does so using an immune-inspired framework (IIF). This creates the AHMS-IIF. This paper presents the results of implementation of the AHMS-IIF on a simple aircraft: the glider system, to see if the AHMS-IIF can provide the situational awareness, which can also increase the endurance of this simple system. The paper shows the AHMS-IIF has provided safer flight outcomes for the glider system. This is judged by the longer duration of flights and higher number of safe landings for the glider, when the glider is flown with the help of the AHMS-IIF at a suitable sampling and accommodation rate. Furthermore, the presented AHMS-IIF is able to achieve its objectives without prior training and optimization of the algorithms, differentiating this framework against other vehicle health management system.