The immediate application for the proposed technology is in the civilian aerospace sector to improve aviation safety and security. However, the technology will readily extend to military aviation and space exploration. The increasing prevalence of remotely-piloted UAVs for military and homeland security applications, their consideration for terrestrial science missions and planetary exploration in the near-to-mid term, and the likely ubiquitous commercial roles of these vehicles in the longer-term, provide numerous opportunities for the transition of the proposed SBIR technologies. Application potential is not limited to the aerospace industry, but is extensible to all systems where a human operator can be assisted by an automated agent. Another application is the use of the joint H/A recovery system as a training aid. The low revenues in the regional airline industry have led to hiring practices that bring in unseasoned pilots with minimal flight experience and training. During Phase II, the authors will have gathered initial data on the utility of training with the joint H/A recovery system in both a desktop simulator as well as higher-fidelity fixed-base simulator. Armed with positive results, the authors can aggressively market this system to regional carriers as a low-cost training solution.
One of the overarching goals of the NASA's Aviation Safety Program is to improve aircraft safety for current and future aircraft. As loss of control accounts for a significant percentage of the fatal accident rate, developing systems that improve the response to upset conditions in flight are critical to achieving this goal. Joint H/A upset recovery research sits as the junction of two integral components of the Aviation Safety Program: Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control research and Integrated Intelligent Flight Deck research. The former seeks to "arrive at a set of validated multidisciplinary integrated aircraft control design tools and techniques for enabling safe flight in the presence of adverse conditions (e.g. faults, damage and/or upsets)." The latter seeks to "establish transformative integrated display concepts, decision support functions, on-board/off-board information management, high-integrity external hazard detection, and effective mechanisms for human-automation interaction that enable safer flight deck systems for NextGen." The current research seeks to not only transform state-of-the-art automated methods for upset recovery into a powerful decision aid system but to extend human-automation interaction to create a system capable of exploiting H/A collaboration.
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