Autonomous Take Off System: Development and Experimental Validation

This paper describes the design and validation process of an innovative Autonomous Take Off system, developed by the Italian Aerospace Research Center (CIRA) in the framework of the Italian national funded project TECVOL (Technologies for the Autonomous Flight). The autonomous take-off module is part of the autonomous Guidance, Navigation and Control prototype worked out by CIRA in the same project, where significant research effort has been devoted to achievement of high automation during all the flight phases, from take off to landing. The developed automated system allows take off, navigation through three-dimensional waypoints and landing of an aircraft without human intervention, also in presence of environmental disturbances and/or subsystem failures. In aerospace research and development activities not only functional requirements play an important role in the project, also process requirements and system engineering methods are fundamental for project success. In particular, the autonomous take off system development and validation process has been designed in order to be highly reliable but with a substantial reduction of needed time and costs. In the paper the process of design and validation applied to the proposed system development is examined in details, while providing also a description of the automatic take off system.