Integration of PALACE and Touchdown Planning Methods for Landing CUAS at Unprepared Sites

Aurora Flight Sciences and MIT have been developing tools and techniques that, together with existing 3D environment decision-making and navigation tools developed by AMRDEC in the PALACE program, are well-suited to the problem of autonomous vertical landing on unprepared landing sites. In this program, Aurora will team with MIT researchers and UC Santa Cruz (UCSC licenses PALACE technologies for AMRDEC) to combine hybrid-system rapidly-expanding random trees (RRTs), PALACE technologies, careful system engineering/integration, and Phase II experimental demonstrations. The result will be a general purpose, environmentally robust, autonomous vertical landing system for remote, unprepared/sloped landing sites with obstacles, environmental disturbances, and minimal ground crew support/training. System engineering will focus on creating a system which minimizes size, weight, power, and cost (SWAP-C) requirements for sensing and computation.