Challenges in Close-Proximity Safe and Seamless Operation of Manned and Unmanned Aircraft in Shared Airspace

Abstract

We propose developing an integrated system to keep autonomous unmanned aircraft safely separated and behave as expected in conjunction with manned traffic. The main goal is to achieve safe manned-unmanned vehicle teaming to improve system performance, have each (robot/human) teammate learn from each other in various aircraft operations, and reduce the manning needs of manned aircraft. The proposed system anticipates and reacts to other aircraft using natural language instructions and can serve as a copilot or operate entirely autonomously. We point out the main technical challenges where improvements on current state-of-the-art are needed to enable Visual Flight Rules to fully autonomous aerial operations, bringing insights to these critical areas. Furthermore, we present an interactive demonstration in a prototypical scenario with one AI pilot and one human pilot sharing the same terminal airspace, interacting with each other using language, and landing safely on the same runway. We also show a demonstration of a vision-only aircraft detection system.

@inproceedings{patrikar2022challenges,
  author = {Patrikar, Jay and Dantas, Joao P. A. and Ghosh, Sourish and Kapoor, Parv and Higgins, Ian and Aloor, Jasmine J. and Navarro, Ingrid and Sun, Jimin and Stoler, Ben and Hamidi, Milad and Baijal, Rohan and Moon, Brady and Oh, Jean and Scherer, Sebastian},
  title = {{Challenges in Close-Proximity Safe and Seamless Operation of Manned and Unmanned Aircraft in Shared Airspace}},
  booktitle = {2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Aerial Robotics Workshop},
  year = {2022},
  location = {Philadelphia, PA, USA}
}