Variable Autonomy Control for Automatic Vehicle Management Systems

"Geneva Aerospace offers provably safe and certifiable control technologies for automatic and seamless mode transitions involving manual and automatic controls for a spectrum of piloted, optionally piloted, remotely operated, and autonomous air, land, andsea vehicles. The emphasis of the proposed effort is in the adaptation of our Variable Autonomy Control System to the optionally piloted air vehicle application to address the many technical and human factors issues surrounding cockpit automation. Wewill demonstrate that our approach is robust, reliable, and predictable. The proposed effort will further demonstrate that our common variable autonomy control architecture supports an entire gamut of moving platforms from piloted to autonomous withminimal changes required to support each specific platform. We will perform a dutiful survey of the existing human factors and taxonomy data associated with vehicle automation. Leveraging from our existing research in vehicle variable autonomy control,we will conduct a subsequent human effectiveness study to identify the appropriate human-system interface that maximizes operator situation awareness. Further, we will investigate the latest advancements in autonomous fault detection algorithms and selectand incorporate those algorithms that show the most promise/feasibility and conduct trade studies on the effectiveness of these algorithms operating within our core architecture. The proposed