Design of the Nominal System Automation of a Cascaded Flight Control Architecture for a Multi-Crew eVTOL Aircraft

With the increase of functional complexity of electric-Vertical-Take-Off-and-Landing aircraft, the design of automation modules comes to the fore, as they relieve the pilot from tedious system management. In this paper, the design of the nominal automation in a cascaded flight control architecture for a 700kg eVTOL is presented. A layered set of state-machines is utilized to achieve the desired functionality. This includes the selection between a set of available pilots in a multi-crew environment, conducting manual flight in different control modes and performing fully automated missions. Further, the key interactions and synchronization between the backup and nominal automation are discussed. To validate the functions of the System Automation, three expressive test scenarios are designed and their results from software-in-the-loop and flight tests are presented.