The Boeing Company

Enrique Juan Magana Casado

Javier Lopez Leones

Juan Besada

Francisco A Navarro

Guillermo Frontera

David Scarlatti

Miguel Vilaplana

David Esteban-Campillo

Ivan Maza

Fernando Caballero

Ana Maria Bernardos Barbolla

Jesus Crespo

The present disclosure provides a computer-implemented method of generating a description of aircraft intent expressed in a formal language that provides an unambiguous description of an aircraft's intended motion and configuration during a period of flight. A description of flight intent is parsed to provide instances of flight intent, each instance of flight intent spanning a flight segment. For each flight segment, an associated flight segment description is generated that comprises one or more instances of flight intent that describe the aircraft's motion in at least one degree of freedom of motion. One or more instances of flight intent are added to flight segments to close all degrees of freedom of motion. The flight segment descriptions are collated thereby providing a description of aircraft intent for the period of flight expressed in a formal language.

Providing a description of aircraft intent

The present invention provides a co-operative network of unmanned vehicles that participate in co-operative task allocation. Each unmanned vehicle comprises a computer system with an executive level configured to control motion of the unmanned vehicle and an automatic decision level configured to communicate with other unmanned vehicles, to receive task descriptions, to participate in task allocation, and to provide descriptions of tasks to be performed to the executive level for execution. Each unmanned vehicle submits a bid for each task it can perform, the bid reflecting an execution cost for the task. The bids are compared and the task effectively auctioned to the unmanned vehicle with a lowest execution cost. Each unmanned vehicle builds a task plan from its allocated tasks, decomposes the associated task descriptions into elementary task descriptions and forwards the elementary task descriptions in a format suitable for the executive level to execute.

Network of unmanned vehicles

The present disclosure provides a computer-implemented method of generating a description of aircraft intent expressed in a formal language that provides an unambiguous description of an aircraft's intended motion and configuration during a period of flight. A description of flight intent is parsed to provide instances of flight intent, each instance of flight intent spanning a flight segment. For each flight segment, an associated flight segment description is generated that comprises one or more instances of flight intent that describe the aircraft's motion in at least one degree of freedom of motion. Flight segment descriptions are compared with constraints and/or objectives and the associated flight segment descriptions are enriched with information describing relevant constraints and/or objectives. The enriched flight intent is converted into aircraft intent by ensuring that the flight segment descriptions close all degrees of freedom of the aircraft during the period of flight.

The present disclosure provides a computer-implemented method of generating a description of aircraft intent expressed in a formal language that provides an unambiguous description of an aircraft's intended motion and configuration during a period of flight. A flight intent description is parsed to provide instances of flight intent that span a flight segment, the flight segments together spanning the period of flight. The parsed flight intent is converted into parametric aircraft intent by generating an associated flight segment description for each flight segment that comprises instances of flight intent to close all associated degrees of freedom of motion and of configuration of the aircraft. At least some flight segment descriptions contain a parameter range, and the method further comprises optimizing the parametric aircraft intent by determining an optimal value for the parameter of each parameter range.

Growing community of inventors

Madrid, Spain

Enrique Juan Magana Casado