Path Planning for Low-Amplitude Flight by Fuzzy Reasoning.

The paper discusses flight-path planning for an aircraft flying at low altitude while avoiding terrain crashes,. In a past study, several algorithms based on exploratory procedures have been proposed; however, they do not generatye practical path that take into account aircraft practical pathe that take into account aircraft inertia. This paper proposes a new algorithm to generate a flight path taking account of the aircraft's inertia; this algorithm does not generate the flight path directly, but determines the aircraft's staring acceleration at every point along the way and then generates the flight path based on the steering acceleration. This algorithm extracts feature perimeters repreenting a relation between the aircraft and the terrain, determines steering acceleration by fuzzy reasoning using the feature parameters, and updates state variables of the aircraft. Furthermore, this paper also proposes a learning algorithm to design the membership values in the fuzzy resoning from reference flights since it is difficult to optimize them by trial and error. The flight-path planning by the proposed algorithm is corporate with that bested on the exploratory procedure. The learning algorithm of the membership values is validated through computer simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]