Artificial Intelligence is Changing The future of Air Transportation
Researchers are working on an interdisciplinary research project funded by NASA that aims to design and develop a safety management system for electric autonomous aircraft. Assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, researches control, optimization, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in air transportation and aviation. His lab builds flight deck and ground-based automation and decision support tools to improve and ensure safety for emerging aircraft types and flight operations.
While a lot of the innovation in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning applications has been focused on revolutionizing the internet and digital connectivity, group of researchers are focused on expanding those benefits into transforming air transportation for physical connectivity and future mobility.
Researchers are investigating on a new three-year, $2.5 million NASA System-Wide Safety grant project. The research team will study system design to minimize risks for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and their advanced air mobility missions in urban environments.
The team’s proposed system design aims to minimize the layered risks for autonomous aircraft. Adverse weather conditions like wind—which is what Researcher’s lab will focus on—affect an electric aircraft’s ability to fly and land safely. Additional risks include electric propulsion component faults or degradations, and threats from other non-cooperative aircraft due to GPS spoofing or software hijacking while in flight. The NASA project seeks to address these three diverse areas of concern—mission level risk, aircraft level risk and airspace level risk.
“Once an autonomous aircraft becomes noncooperative, whether it’s being hijacked, or an autonomy fault , or a motor/battery problem, or due to winds, that aircraft starts to drift away from its track, how do we detect that and how do other aircraft avoid those potential collisions or conflicts.
Widespread adoption of safe driverless cars remains years off. The same can be said about autonomous aircraft, Researcher said Pilotless air travel would likely begin with transporting small packages or lunch delivery from local restaurants. If those applications are proven safe and successful, larger cargo flights and autonomous passenger air transportation could be introduced—potentially improving traffic congestion and enabling people to live farther from their places of work.
“If a machine learning algorithm makes a mistake in Facebook, TikTok, Netflix —that doesn’t matter too much. “But if a machine learning algorithm mistake happens in a safety-critical application, such as aviation or in autonomous driving, people may have accidents.
