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Atlanta, GA | Posted: June 5, 2014
From traffic monitoring to crop dusting, the potential uses for unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) have ingited the popular imagination.
But we still have a little way to go before your late-night pizza arrives via a micro air vehicle.
A report released June 5 by the National Research Council has identified potential barriers to the safe integration of unmanned autonomous vehicles into civil airspace.
The 94-page report, co-authored by AE's Dr. J. P. Clarke, also maps out a research agenda that could address those challenges and launch a new era in air transport.
“There is little doubt that over the long run the potential benefits of unmanned aircraft in civil aviation will indeed be great, but there should be equally little doubt that getting there while maintaining the safety and efficiency of the nation’s civil aviation system will be no easy matter,” said Clarke, co-chair of the committee that wrote the report.
The report emphasizes that the most critical goal is to ensure that these aircraft perform with the same high level of safety and reliability expected of civil aviation systems.
Among the most pressing obstacles are:
To surmount these and other barriers, the report recommends a national research agenda that would involve government, industry, and academic leaders in eight research projects, the following four of which are considered crucial:
Enabling unmanned aircraft to operate for extended periods of time without real-time human oversight will require that the autonomous systems be able to perform certain critical functions currently provided by humans, such as “detect and avoid” and contingency decision-making. Successful development of these systems and technologies depends on understanding how humans perform their roles in the current system and how these roles are translated to the autonomous system, particularly for high-risk situations.
Modeling and simulation capabilities will play an important role in the development of autonomous aircraft because they enable researchers, designers, regulators, and operators to get information about how something performs without actually testing it in real life. For example, computer simulations may be able to test the performance of an autonomous aircraft in millions of scenarios in a short timeframe to produce a statistical basis for determining safety risks. The committee recommended the creation of a distributed suite of modeling and simulation modules developed by disparate organizations with the ability to be interconnected or networked; monolithic modeling efforts that are intended to “do it all” and answer all questions posed tend not to be effective.
“The barriers we identify and the research agenda we propose to overcome them is a vital next step as we venture into this new era of flight,” said committee co-chair John Lauber, a consultant and former Senior Vice President and Chief Product Safety Officer at Airbus.
The study was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Technology. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council make up the National Academies. They are private, independent nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter granted to NAS in 1863. The National Research Council is the principal operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.
