A Stochastic Compound Failure Model for Testing Resilience of Autonomous Fixed-Wing Aircraft I: Formulation and Simulation

This paper presents a simulation process to dynamically emulate the effects of certain adversarial flight conditions on fixed-wing, autonomous aircraft system actuators. We implement a PX4 Autopilot flight stack module that replaces the generated attitude control inputs with perturbed inputs to the plane's actuator mixer. The perturbed inputs rely on a Markov chain to model failure states that emulate adversarial (failing) actuator flight conditions. Simulated flight failures on a fixed-wing autonomous aircraft test the controller response to a stochastic failure sequence on a range of turning radii. Statistical measures between of the differences between unaffected and perturbed flight paths provides analyses, indicating that a well-tuned PID controller remains competitive in the cascading, compound, transient failure regime.