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The 94-page report, co-authored by AE's Professor  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:

  • Technological barriers
    This includes the inherent difficulty associated with characterizing and predicting the behavior of systems that can adapt to changing conditions. This poses a particular challenge in engineering unmanned and autonomous systems to be compatible with already-existing air traffic management systems and other elements of the national airspace system. And the ability of systems to operate independently of human operators is currently limited by the capabilities of machine sensory, perceptual, and cognitive systems
     
  • Regulation and certification
    These barriers include the fact that existing processes, criteria, and approaches for certifying aircraft do not adequately address the special characteristics of advanced autonomous systems. In addition, many existing safety standards and requirements, which are focused on ensuring the safety of aircraft passengers and crew, are not well suited to ensure the safety of unmanned aircraft operations, where the main concern is the safety of people in other aircraft and on the ground.
     
  • Other barriers
    Other barriers include social issues, such as public concerns about privacy and safety, and legal hurdles, such as public policy, reflected in law and regulation. To help surmount these and other barriers, the report recommends a national research agenda that would involve government agencies, industry, and academia.

 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:

  1. Behavior of adaptive/nondeterministic systems.
    Technologies that enable aircraft to adapt to uncertain environments and to learn based on experience will be integral to many advanced autonomous aircraft. As autonomous systems take over more functions traditionally performed by humans, there will be a growing need to incorporate autonomous monitoring and other safeguards to ensure that appropriate operational behavior continues. Research is needed to develop new methods and tools to address the inherent uncertainties in airspace system operations due to factors such as weather and conflicting air traffic and thereby enable advanced autonomous systems to improve their performance and provide greater assurance of safety.
     
  2. Operation without continuous human oversight.

    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.
     

  3. Modeling and simulation. 

    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.
     

  4. Verification, validation, and certification.
    The high levels of safety achieved in the operation of the national airspace system largely reflect the formal requirements imposed by the FAA for verification, validation, and certification of hardware and software and the certification of people as a condition for entry into the system. Extension of these concepts and principles to highly autonomous aircraft and systems is not a simple matter and will require the development of new approaches and tools.

“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. 
 

Read the report

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