Adaptive Vehicle Management Systems Phase I Overview

Decades of flight controls and vehicle management system technology development have focused on the development of full authority digital flight control systems. More recently, efforts have begun to focus on developing capabilities that more fully exploit such flight control systems, making use of more of the information available on a modern rotorcraft system, and integrating multiple features and functions together into suites of technologies. The Adaptive Vehicle Management System (AVMS) program was created to identify and demonstrate technologies and develop the framework of an adaptive vehicle management system – a vehicle management system that maximizes system performance by utilizing all available information across all subsystems and reacts to maintain performance even under anomalous/degraded conditions. This paper presents the results of the two-year first phase of the AVMS program, which explored many technologies and included flight testing of the AVMS technology suite on the Boeing H-6 flying testbed aircraft. A methodology for prioritizing and selecting component technologies is described, followed by a detailed description of the work performed to investigate and develop several of the component technologies. Specifically, the technologies discussed in detail in this paper are tactile cueing for mission aiding, torque management VMS solutions, tactile cueing for legacy mechanical control systems, external load active stabilization, and adaptive control technology. Overall, the AVMS Phase I program showed that many advanced vehicle management functions can be combined in an integrated design to deliver a broad range of performance benefits, with tactile cueing proving to be an important enabling technology that allows a pilot to intuitively interact with a large number of modes and functions.