Flight Test Results for a New Mission-Adaptive Autonomy System on the RASCAL JUH-60A Black Hawk

Flight test results are presented for a pilot-selectable autonomous system designed within a framework termed "Mission-Adaptive Autonomy." The system was tested on the U.S. Army Aviation Development Directorate (ADD) RASCAL JUH-60A Black Hawk and included features such as obstacle field navigation, safe landing area determination with selectable landing points, threat avoidance, selectable flight level control, any-time redirection, and pilot-autonomy shared control. Control and display interfaces were designed to enable a pilot to work in concert with the available autonomy. Autonomy status and intent was displayed using both newly developed moving map symbology and symbology derived from existing forward-flight and landing-approach displays. Pilots were able to switch between autonomous control and conventional Level 1 attitude-command/attitude-hold (ACAH) manual control laws at will. Operationally relevant mission tasks were flown in a simulated degraded visual environment over urban areas with defined traffic control regions and at low level in mountainous terrain with pop-up threats. Three configurations were tested: 1) a baseline ACAH system with no autonomous features, 2) a display-only configuration that provided autonomous navigation guidance via display symbology, and 3) a full Mission-Adaptive Autonomy configuration.