Wamore's Ambassador 2K Precision Guided Parachute System recently proved its mettle with the most complex and challenging mission to date. The drop zone was completely surrounded by tall mountains and nested in a very tight valley. The drop zone was only 50m wide x 660m long. The Roadway Landing Mode of JPADS software running on Ambo 2K was selected for this unique requirement. With proper mission planning and perfect execution by the aircrew, all systems were deployed such that the strong, changing, swirling, chaotic winds were accounted for by Ambo 2K. All 6 systems computed and executed the proper flight path to avoid the hills, setup on the long axis of drop zone, and flew right up the gap for on target, soft landing. Roadway Landing Mode is designed to nail the programmed landing direction while sacrificing the actual distance from the programmed point. For a drop zone depicted in the attachment, this is the perfect mission plan. Not so concerned about exactly where on the drop zone we land, just that all systems are on the drop zone. What a great day for the end users who perfectly packed, rigged, planned, loaded, deployed, and recovered the systems for reuse. Video to follow in next post showing just how challenging the terrain/valley was...
A genuinely remarkable result. How far we’ve come since our community first took on the challenge of parafoil autopilot more than 30 years ago.
Congratulations! It's the most excellent team to work with. I love the taste of success.
Awesome results!
Test Manager at DTRA TSTM-N
1yOleg Yakimenko, Vladimir N. Dobrokhodov A good thesis would tell you to drive to the target at altitude and spiral a helix down to the target along the way to minimize the atmospheric uncertainty. A little bit of atmospheric prediction, measurement, or real-time calculation goes a long way toward precision. AIAA-2003-2105: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SIX-DEGREE-OF-FREEDOM MODEL OF A LOW-ASPECT-RATIO PARAFOIL DELIVERY SYSTEM I’m pretty sure the associated NPS thesis is available for public release.