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A NASA project called Resilient Autonomy
has developed autonomous software to help
prevent airplane crashes.
This software is called the Expandable Variable Autonomy
Architecture or EVAA, which stems from the automatic ground
collision avoidance system or Auto GCAS.
This technology started off 35 years ago
on the F-16 only a few hundred feet away from us right now.
That was the first aircraft on a high performance
aircraft with a digital flight control system.
And we started to bring a lot of automation onto it.
We quickly found that automated safety was a critical component
just even to flight tested.
Over the next 25 years, we work towards our automatic ground
collision avoidance system and eventually got
it field in the F-16 fleet.
Taking a roll inverted.
The Auto GCAS system takes control
of an aircraft from the pilot at the last possible moment
to avoid an imminent ground collision.
That's all automatic.
Today it's saved up to 11 lives out there in the fleet.
But that technology was focused on supporting fighters.
And it didn't scale well to other platforms.
The team changed the algorithms used
in the F-16 version of Auto GCAS to make
them suitable for non-fighter aircraft like Cessnas
or remotely piloted aircraft.
We've created a software architecture
that can be expanded to support any mission or platform.
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
We support variable autonomy in the fact
that it can be a safety augmentation
and warn a pilot to all the way to a fully unpiloted aircraft
that doesn't even have a pilot in the loop.
The intent is to create a software architecture that
can easily be adapted to any form of mission or platform
or autonomy level you want.
See if it'll pick right or left here.
This version includes functions to prevent smaller airplanes
from diving into a canyon, into the side of a mountain,
or into the ground in the event of an emergency by avoiding
obstacles and guiding the plane to a safe landing area.
It draws upon multiple systems, multiple sensors.
And it leverages hopping from one system
to the next prioritizing different safety
elements or the mission.
So we're emphasizing that timing element of going from one thing
on to the next in rapid succession.
Now we will be in altitude hold mode.
Slightly different than we were before that
is going to fly us through that notch over this very complex
wind turbine farm.
All right, now we just picked up a detection of a king air
at our 6 o'clock high.
An element called the moral compass
helps the software decide which moves
to make by switching control to the highest priority task based
on weighing the odds of safety.
The moral compass is at the heart of this rapid switching.
OK, you can see it's triggered into the yellow mode
there well clear so it's in a dive.
You can see we've got basically a fence or a wall of these wind
turbines in front of us.
And we're just cresting over the top of a line of them
behind us.
But we're still in well clear mode,
it doesn't yet care about the wind turbines.
So we're descending out of the way
of that traffic that's almost directly overhead us now
on the approach.
We're getting closer to those wind turbines.
OK, now GCAS is taking over climbing
right turn and aggressive turn to the right.
Now it detects it's fairly close to the aircraft
so it is doing an aggressive left ACAS
turn climbing away right on the edge of these wind turbine
obstacles.
And now it's back into well clear.
We're trying to deconflict the hazards temporally.
Separate them in time and then quickly resolve
each individual one so that now we
can switch from one to the next, to the next, to the next.
So we bring this metadata processed,
metadata onto the aircraft, whether it's
terrain or obstacles or risk of landing.
And that gives our algorithms a strategic vision
of how it needs to execute things.
So we can then trade these and decide this
is the most important thing.
To increase aviation safety and decrease the number of crashes,
the DOD, the FAA and other groups
such as the Alaska Bush Pilot community
are looking into how the software could
be integrated into a variety of aircraft in the future.
General aviation, especially the Bush Pilot community
has a very challenging task to go out there and fly
in a very rough environment.
And they see higher loss rates.
This technology could prevent that.
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The EVAA software is being managed
under the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center Technology
Transfer Office.
Future availability and capability enhancement
will be managed by an extended potential collaboration
of NASA, the DOD, and the FAA.
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Other NASA projects such as advanced air
mobility are looking at potential use cases of EVAA,
as they investigate how to help the FAA integrate
air taxis, cargo delivery, or small package delivery vehicles
into the National Airspace.