It is my great pleasure to present another issue of The Wright Flyer Papers. Through this series, Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) presents a sampling of exemplary research produced by our residence and distance-learning students. This series has long showcased the kind of visionary thinking that drove the aspirations and activities of the earliest aviation pioneers. This year’s selection of essays admirably extends that tradition. As the series title indicates, these papers aim to present cutting-edge, actionable knowledge—research that addresses some of the most complex security and defense challenges facing us today.
Recently, The Wright Flyer Papers transitioned...
Military use of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) has grown dramatically in recent years. An RPA is an aircraft flown by a human pilot not physically present in the aircraft. The pilot sends control inputs via a data link that can, through the use of satellite communications, reach across the globe from pilot to aircraft. In turn, the aircraft sends information about its performance and collected data back to the pilot along the same link. These systems offer many benefits, including reduced or eliminated risk to human life, increased efficiency, dramatically improved time on station, and lower cost. However, two key...
Throughout history, humanity has sought ways to multiply the benefits of its labor; perhaps the most powerful example is the development of automation. Machines that perform tasks previously requiring human attention and labor can be leveraged to reduce human workload or increase individual effectiveness. Recent technological advances have approached the logical end point of this evolution—the development of autonomous machines capable of performing their intended function with little or no human oversight for substantial periods of time. Such machines offer obvious advantages, particularly in situations where direct human control is either impossible or undesirable.
In this study, “autonomy” reflects...
NASA is the civilian organization that operates the nation’s space program. Although it conducts space operations, its primary function is scientific research. This research falls generally into four categories: aeronautics, human exploration, science, and space technology.35 Resulting from decades of experience in the design and operation of robotic spacecraft, NASA is one of the foremost research institutions in the world in the fields of robotics and machine autonomy. NASA has successfully landed four mobile rovers on the surface of Mars, beginning with Sojourner in 1997 and culminating with the spectacular landing of Curiosity in 2012.
In the modern world of...
NASA’s approach to rover automation offers a number of lessons that demonstrate a proven path for military RPA development. The most important of these are not the merits a specific piece of hardware or programming but the overall philosophy that guided its development. This conceptual framework is comprised of two broad areas—an adjustable approach to autonomy and the development of modular systems. Neither of these is a particularly striking observation, but the state of the RPA industry in its current form indicates that emphasizing these lessons is still useful.
Modularity is simply a means for problem solving or engineering...
Several specific lessons from NASA’s OASIS research apply directly to the development of military RPAs. First, the USAF must employ an appropriate overall philosophy to this initiative based on the concepts of modular design and adjustable autonomy. Modular design creates a system of steady advancement, shared components, and competitive development at a subsystem level. The principle of adjustable autonomy allows for reliance on human oversight and autonomous behavior according to each situation’s demands. Robust feature detection capabilities are a good place to start, initially as decision aids to human operators and then as the basis for onboard autonomous decision making....
