Application of Commercially Developed, Digital Engineering Software and Autonomy Development Ecosystem to Air Force Programs with Specific Use Cases

Modern warfare demands advanced intelligence perception technologies on-board the Air Force’s fleet of aircraft.  From fighters to tankers to UAVs, operational capabilities spanning simplified flight operations (SFO), optionally piloted aircraft (OPA) to full autonomy and manned/unmanned teaming are critical to the next generation of aerial combat and logistics.  Many of these ideas are central to advanced capabilities of the Digital Century Series concept and related Next Generation Air Dominance and Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). The enabling technologies require cutting edge software and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that are often expensive and slow to develop.  To accelerate the development and adoption of these technologies, VTI has built an aerospace-specific ecosystem, FlightStack, for development of complex, data-driven perception systems across commercial and defense aerospace applications.  FlightStack is a digital engineering solution that integrates and orchestrates core software building blocks across data management, simulation and sensor modeling, algorithm training and testing, and workflow automation to rapidly accelerate development of new airborne perception functions, from requirements generation through field deployment.  VTI has successfully leveraged FlightStack to develop a variety of aerospace capabilities with commercial partners including 1) Machine learning (ML) augmentation to enhanced vision system (EVS) that automatically detects and annotates key features of the terminal area (i.e. runways), other aircraft traffic, ground and terrain obstacles, and other fixed features of interest. 2) Emergency landing zone identification and assessment. 3) Execution of complex unmanned missions such as landing on large vessels at sea. 4) Vertiport operations with mixed manned/unmanned vehicles. 5) Runway surface taxi and takeoff automation. VTI is engaged with many additional customers across a variety of aerospace applications.