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Analysis of the Ground Collision Avoidance System Within NASA’s Expandable Vehicle Autonomy Architecture
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2025-03-01
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Abstract:This document provides comprehensive methodology and results in the evaluation of a Ground Collision Avoidance System (GCAS) tuned for a general aviation airplane. The GCAS under investigation was designed by the Armstrong flight research center at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This research focused on two characteristics of the GCAS: protection and nuisance. ‘Protection’ refers to the GCAS’ ability to detect and prevent an airplane from a ground collision. ‘Nuisance’ refers to any inappropriate intervention or inhibition from the GCAS inflicted on the pilot. To evaluate the system protection, a recovery autopilot was built and coupled alongside the GCAS under investigation. The system-wide analysis employed Monte Carlo techniques, simulating over 60,000 unique conditions. Our findings showed that GCAS’ protection capabilities are exceptional, with an overall protection rate of 98.5%. Nuisance evaluation utilized over 3,000 hours of ADS-B flight data from more than 8,000 flights to ascertain whether a GCAS maneuver would be commanded. Our findings show that the GCAS version under test was quite nuisance-prone, especially around terminal areas with over 30% of flights containing unrequired GCAS activations. Overall, GCAS has very strong protection abilities but further tuning to alleviate prominent nuisance of this version is required. Throughout the duration of this project, the authors wrote four different academic conference papers pertaining to these two categories. This document aggregates these four papers into chapters and provides a high-level summarization of the project.
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[PDF-7.89 MB]
