Through NSF Grant, Researchers Creating Advanced Autopilot to Mimic the 'Sully Factor'
URBANA, Ill., October 2, 2019 (Newswire.com) - It’s called the “Miracle on the Hudson.” On Jan. 15, 2009, U.S. Airways Flight 1549 left LaGuardia Airport in New York City en route to Seattle via Charlotte. Shortly after takeoff, the plane hit birds and lost two engines. Faced with few options, the captain, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, took elusive action and landed the plane in the Hudson River, saving the lives of the 155 people on board.
While Sullenberger’s experience – a fighter pilot and training officer with the United States Air Force and 30 years as a commercial airline pilot – no doubt was a factor in his quick decision making, not all passengers are lucky enough to have that experience guiding their flights.
Through at National Science Foundation grant, a team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering and the Georgia Institute of Technology are working on an advanced autopilot, which will autonomously evaluate unforeseen circumstances, take the best course of action, and land the plane safely.
“We cannot be all Captain Sully,” said Lui Sha, an expert in safety critical real-time systems and the principal investigator on this project. “He is a genius. He is to pilots what Michelangelo is to painters. However, not all pilots have his expertise.”
Sha is joined on this all-star team by Naira Hovakiyman, the world’s top specialist in robust flight and L1 adaptive control and a professor mechanical science and engineering at Illinois; Evangelos Theodorou, who leads the Autonomous Control and Decision Systems Laboratory at Georgia Tech and is an expert in stochastic control and machine learning; and Petros Voulgaris, a professor of aerospace engineering at Illinois who also specializes in robust networked control systems.
“Even as smart as Sully is, it still took him 32 seconds to understand it was a bird strike, that the engines were gone, and decide to land in the river,” Hovakimyan noted. “We want to build a flight control system that could handle a lot of uncertainties instantly. To make this happen, we need high fault-tolerant computing infrastructure that can withstand high-stress situations (CPU, GPU, parallelization and so on) and the full detection isolation to immediately work when something happens.”
Hovakimyan has been working on the L1 Adaptive Control theory, which can aid a pilot to regain control of an airplane in sudden and drastic circumstances, for about 15 years. Her research was validated by NASA on a subscale commercial jet and by the United States Air Force on a Learjet and an F16.
The new autopilot will make it less dependent on the pilot and act immediately. It will combine image processing from cameras, Google maps, etc., as well as on-board computers, and include a built-in sensor redundancy.
Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign