Autonomy Research for Civil Aviation Toward a New Era of Flight (2014) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2 Potential Benefits and Uses of Increased Autonomy
2 Potential Benefits and Uses of Increased Autonomy
Pages 20-30
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 20... ...
This chapter also reviews the use of IA systems for nonaviation applications. POTENTIAL BENEFITS OF INCREASED AUTONOMY FOR CIVIL AVIATION Estimates of the current market for commercial UAS range from $5.9 billion annually in the United States to $89 billion worldwide.1,2 The drivers behind the growth of UAS include the potential to increase safety and reliability, reduce costs, and enable new operational capabilities.
|
From page 21... ...
To fully realize these safety improvements, safety standards established for the certification and operation of UAS will need to take into account how the accident rate of UAS compares to the accident rate of the crewed aircraft that UAS would replace and of the potentially large number of UAS that would be used for applications that are not currently performed using aircraft. Costs IA systems have the potential to reduce costs by reducing the need for highly skilled operators, by enabling more efficient operations, and by relying on UAS to conduct missions that would otherwise be executed by crewed aircraft.
|
From page 22... ...
The traditional approach to dealing with situations where the cognitive demand required to complete a given set of specified tasks is beyond the cognitive capacity of a single person is to divide the tasks among multiple personnel so that no individual is overloaded. For example, in airspace with a large number of aircraft, air traffic control tasks may be divided so that aircraft in a particular airspace volume are under the control of an R-side (or radar)
|
From page 23... ...
USES OF INCREASED AUTONOMY IN CIVIL AVIATION Air Traffic Management Current ATM procedures vary little from those followed by air traffic controllers 50 years ago. While automation has increased the availability of information and facilitates communications among controllers, decisions are still made by human beings.
|
From page 24... ...
Rotary-wing aircraft missions include short-haul commercial passenger and cargo transportation, disaster relief, search and rescue, medical evacuation, construction, logging, fire fighting, pipeline management and inspection, drug interdiction, border control, traffic management, law enforcement, and agricultural services.7 Rotorcraft are particularly important for operations to destinations such as oil platforms, hospitals, and accident scenes without runways for fixed-wing aircraft. The role of the rotorcraft pilot has been continuously influenced by the instantiation of IA systems.
|
From page 25... ...
As already noted, the accident rate for general aviation is much higher than that for commercial air carriers. Over the past decade, about 70 percent of the fixed-wing general aviation accidents were attributed to pilot-related causes, mostly associated with flight planning and decision making, particularly in high-workload situations associated with takeoff, approach, low-altitude maneuvering, and adverse weather.
|
From page 26... ...
However, the FAA prohibits the commercial use of unmanned aircraft in the United States without proper certificates of waiver or authorization, 14,15 and it has shut down some innovative uses of UAS, such as on-site delivery of beer to ice fisherman by a brewery in Wisconsin.16 In addition to these regulatory impediments, low-altitude operations in cluttered airspace present a very difficult operational challenge as well as a correspondingly large commercial opportunity for the use of small UAS.17 BENEFITS AND USES OF INCREASED AUTONOMY IN NONAVIATION APPLICATIONS Aviation is by no means the only domain to exploit increased autonomous capability. The use of increased autonomy in several other application domains has been significant and will continue to influence the development of IA systems with relevance to civil aviation.
|
From page 27... ...
However, as sophisticated as these robotic manufacturing machines may be, they do not possess -- nor do they need to possess -- the sophisticated analytical capabilities that will be characteristic of the advanced IA systems for civil aviation. Autonomy in the medical arena has been mostly evident in automated patient monitoring systems of various types.
|
From page 28... ...
This poses a safety challenge, a legal challenge regarding presumed responsibility, and a social challenge with respect to acceptance of the new technology. Although ground vehicle applications of autonomy for the most part differ substantially from civil aviation applications, there are also several parallels and opportunities to build joint expertise on responding to the challenges of increased autonomy: • The drivers of cars and the pilots of general aviation aircraft would both benefit from relatively inexpensive IA systems that could to some degree serve as copilots, alerting the driver or pilot of hazards that have been overlooked and taking corrective action in extremis.
|
From page 29... ...
Employing autonomous navigation and other autonomous robotic functions, the relatively slow, deliberate movements and transit speeds of unmanned underwater vehicles help ensure that they have ample time to process information for autonomous decision making. Unmanned surface vehicles, which may operate at much higher speeds than underwater vehicles, also need to detect and avoid other watercraft.
|
From page 30... ...
Perhaps the most significant application of autonomy to civil aviation will come from the technologies used to deal with the long time delays between the ground and the spacecraft. The space domain has learned to use robust software algorithms to successfully operate spacecraft without continuous human inputs.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.