A Stochastic Compound Failure Model for Testing Resilience of Autonomous Fixed-Wing Aircraft I: Formulation and Simulation

Abstract

This paper presents a Markov chain model to dynamically emulate the effects of adverse (failure) flight conditions on fixed-wing, autonomous aircraft system actuators. It implements a PX4 Autopilot flight stack module that perturbs the attitude control inputs to the plane's actuator mixer. We apply this approach in simulation on a fixed-wing autonomous aircraft to test the controller response to stochastic compound failures on a range of turning radii. Statistical measures of the differences between target and simulated flight paths demonstrate that a well-tuned PID controller remains competitive with adaptive control in a cascading, compound, transient failure regime.