Seminar: "Integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Safely into the National Airspace System"

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as the Air Force's Global Hawk and Predator are increasingly employed by the military in roles that require sharing airspace with civilian aircraft. Many civil applications of UAVs have also been proposed for tasks that include border patrols, highway and agricultural observation, and cargo transport. Due to the pressure for widespread access for UAVs and the risk of collision with passenger aircraft, the U.S. is rapidly facing serious safety concerns.

This seminar provides an overview of the safety issues of UAVs sharing airspace with passenger airplanes, including methods for evaluating and mitigating collision risk. The presentation will describe an initiative at MIT Lincoln Laboratory to assess the safety of one particular application, the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), on the Global Hawk UAV. TCAS is in use on all large passenger-carrying aircraft as an independent, last-resort collision-avoidance system. TCAS uses a set of sensors and algorithms to detect potential mid-air collisions, alert the flight crew, and provide guidance so that they can avoid a collision. Adapting TCAS to Global Hawk, which has unconventional flight characteristics and a pilot who may be thousands of miles away, creates challenges that require a thorough safety analysis before TCAS might be accepted by domestic and international communities.

This seminar describes the overall approach to safety analysis, including the use of fast-time simulation of UAVs and conventional air traffic. Finally, extensions to future applications, such as onboard infrared, visual, or radar detection systems designed to "see and avoid" other aircraft, will be discussed.

Speaker: Dr. Mykel J. Kochenderfer
Affiliation: MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Date: Monday, 01 December 2008 (NOTE: this is the day after break!)
Time: 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.; Q&A session to follow
Location: 641 Dow

Biography:
Mykel J. Kochenderfer is a member of technical staff in the Surveillance Systems group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he has focused on the development and safety analysis of collision avoidance systems for manned and unmanned aircraft. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in Informatics for research on model-based reinforcement learning. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from Stanford University in Computer Science. He has been involved in artificial intelligence research at Rockwell Scientific, the Honda Research Institute, and Microsoft Research. He is a third generation pilot.

**Refreshments will be available at the seminar.**