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CEAS EuroGNC 2022

The Vortex Position Estimator used for the Airbus fello'fly Transatlantic Crossing
Jordan Adams Airbus, Toulouse, France.
Clément Frot Airbus, Toulouse, France.
Guillaume Ta Airbus, Toulouse, France.
Abstract:
In November 2021 the Airbus fello'fly project completed two transatlantic formation flights demonstrating a reduction of fuel consumption of 5% trip fuel for the follower. The follower achieved this by maintaining an optimum lateral position relative to the wake vortices generated by the leader. The flights were achieved automatically via the existing auto flight system, modified such that commands to the autopilot outer loops could be provided by additional real-time computers. A dedicated data-link was also installed for aircraft to aircraft communication of parameters. The computation of the relative position feedbacks for the control loops were based on a geometric model of the wake vortex propagation. Due to assumptions in the propagation model, and the precision of the source data, this initial position estimate could not be sufficiently accurate for maintaining the fuel saving position. To achieve the required accuracy, an additional indirect measurement of the vortex position was obtained by combining a model of the aircraft trim with a parametric model of the rolling moment induced by the vortices on the follower. A four state model of the system was constructed, including two states for the position bias obtained from the geometric wake position model, one state for the shape of the vortex effect map, and one state for the aircraft lateral trim bias. Estimation of the position was achieved with a bootstrap particle filter, wherein the importance sampling distribution was based on the prior distribution. A resampling step was performed whenever a computed indicator of the degeneracy of the particle weights decreased below a threshold. The resampling was performed using a multinomial systematic resampling algorithm.
Keywords: Formation flight; Bootstrap particle filter; fello'fly; Wake surfing
 View PDF CEAS-GNC-2022-037


Jordan Adams, Clément Frot, Guillaume Ta: The Vortex Position Estimator used for the Airbus fello'fly Transatlantic Crossing. Proceedings of the 2022 CEAS EuroGNC conference. Berlin, Germany. May 2022. CEAS-GNC-2022-037.
BibTeX entry:

@Incollection{CEAS-GNC-2022-037,
    authors = {Adams, Jordan and Frot, Clément and Ta, Guillaume},
    title = {The Vortex Position Estimator used for the Airbus fello'fly Transatlantic Crossing},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2022 {CEAS EuroGNC} conference},
    address = {Berlin, Germany},
    month = may,
    year = {2022},
    note = {CEAS-GNC-2022-037}
}