SkyAID: A Safe Autonomy Infrastructure for Disaster Response

Emergency response applications such as wildfire suppression present an important and challenging proving ground for autonomous aviation in the near future. Autonomous operation is desirable because these scenarios are dangerous for pilots and can be more cost-effective. They are challenging because autonomous decision-making has to work with incomplete information (e.g., partial visibility with smoke) in a dynamically evolving environment such as loss of communication. To meet these challenges the autonomy stack has to establish a higher degree of resilience to off-nominal conditions. Systems should have the ability to dynamically adapt to changes in the external environment - such as visibility, GPS availability, connectivity to human operators and other agents in the fleet - as well as internal (vehicle-level) failures and degradation. The system should be able to rationally self-organize the sensing and communication architecture based on current estimate of available resources. Finally, system designers should be able to provide evidence for certifying the safe operation of the whole system at design time and monitor its performance at runtime. Towards accomplishing these goals, and more broadly aligned with NASA's strategic plans for enabling aircraft autonomy, our team at Rational CyPhy Inc. will develop SkyAID - a framework for enabling autonomous aircraft operations. The fundamental technical breakthroughs anticipated are: * Fast timescale adaptation with safe, multi-objective, detect-and-avoid algorithms that lower workload in beyond visual line of sight operations; * Autonomous adaptation to changing environment for optimized perception and communication, based on recent innovations in safe learning-enabled control; * Continuous verification, validation, and certification technologies reducing development cycles and increasing overall safety and mission success.