Tag: 2018 Science and Technology Forum

Tech Challenges of On-Demand Mobility

Panelists: Moderator Michael Patterson, aerospace technologist, NASA’s Langley Research Center; Danette Allen, senior technologist of intelligent flight systems, NASA’s Langley Research Systems; Brian J. German, Langley associate professor, Georgia Institute of Technology; Andrew R. Gibson, president, Empirical Systems Aerospace Inc.; Ken Goodrich, senior research engineer, NASA’s Langley Research Center; Stephen Rizzi, senior researcher for aeroacoustics, NASA’s Langley Research Center

By Tom Risen, Aerospace America staff reporter (2017-2018)

Technologies that led to the boom in consumer drones are making it possible for companies to build a new generation of electric vertical takeoff and landing craft, or eVTOLs, but businesses aspiring to on-demand mobility face new obstacles. Engineers and NASA technologists detailed these challenges Jan. 10 during the “On-Demand Mobility — Enabling Technologies and Capabilities” panel at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida.

Distributed electric propulsion, propeller technologies and autonomous flight software are among the technologies pioneered by consumer drones being used in aircraft designs that can expand conventional on-demand flight and enable new air cargo delivery and sky taxi services.

NASA held a series of workshops two years ago that came up with a prioritized list of 10 barriers to on-demand mobility, the foremost being ease of certification, affordability and safety, said Michael Patterson, an aerospace technologist with NASA’s Langley Research Center.

“If one of these doesn’t get addressed, the whole thing probably doesn’t happen,” Patterson said of the list of 10 priorities, which includes community noise reduction for the aircraft.

Public acceptance will also depend on certification and safety concerns about autonomous flight software, said Danette Allen, senior technologist of intelligent flight systems at NASA’s Langley Research Systems in Virginia. The public will also have to clear up misconceptions about autonomous flight, Allen said, explaining that “unmanned” is not the same as “autonomous,” because aircraft are not autonomous if humans are still waiting at monitors ready to intervene.

Designing an electric aircraft around the electric propulsion source can give manufacturers a head start on addressing safety and efficiency, said Andrew R. Gibson, president of California-based Empirical Systems Aerospace Inc. Gibson’s company is the prime contractor for NASA’s X-57 plane, which aims to be quieter and five times more energy-efficient during high-altitude cruising than a combustion-driven plane of the same size.

Ken Goodrich, a senior research engineer at Langley, said there has been “a tipping point the last two or three years” at the agency, which is more interested than ever in on-demand mobility in part because of progress in driverless cars.

“As somebody who has had a passion for small aircraft going back to when I first started at NASA several decades back, the idea of using advanced automation to make airplanes simple to fly has always faced a healthy amount of skepticism,” Goodrich said.

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Mainstreaming Urban Air Mobility

Panelists: Moderator Bruce Holmes, vice president for digital aviation, SmartSky Networks LLC; Carl Dietrich, chief technology officer and co-founder, Terrafugia; Mark Moore, director of engineering, Uber Elevate; Mark Cousin, senior vice president of flight demonstrators, Airbus; Brian Yutko, vice president of research and development, Aurora Flight Sciences

By Tom Risen, Aerospace America staff reporter (2017-2018)

Companies are building and testing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or eVTOLs, to ferry people above car traffic, but they need to be safe, affordable and energy-efficient to become part of a daily commute. Entrepreneurs and engineers detailed how their companies are tackling these challenges Jan. 10 during the “Dude, Where’s My Flying Car” panel at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida.

To build an urban air mobility ecosystem for these aircraft, vehicle manufacturers will have to coordinate with numerous types of organizations, including real estate providers to create landing pads known as skyports, said Mark Moore, director of engineering at California-based Uber Elevate.

“We will never build a vehicle, but we want to make sure that our partners who are building vehicles are successful and that these aircraft are as community-friendly as possible,” Moore said, explaining Uber Elevate’s partnership with manufacturers and regulatory agencies to clear the way for Uber to provide on-demand flight through a mobile app. Some of the companies partnering with Uber have not publicly released their aircraft concepts, so Moore unveiled a “common reference model” that illustrates some of the challenges these electric aircraft will face, including battery energy density and noise pollution.

“The batteries are almost there, because the longest distance we need to travel in between skyports is only 45 miles,” Moore said.

Noise and expense are two of the major reasons helicopters are not more widely used for urban transport, and eVTOLs will have to improve upon both to gain public acceptance, said Mark Cousin, senior vice president of flight demonstrators at Airbus.

Cousin predicted there would be “a multitude” of aircraft designs for the new generation of urban air mobility, referring to the numerous types of cars on the road. Airbus holds true to that example: a prototype of its CityAirbus air taxi will test fly at the end of 2018, he said. A full-scale demonstrator of the tandem tilt-wing Vahana aircraft by Airbus’ Silicon Valley arm, A3 [pronounced “A cubed”], “will fly within the next month,” he said.

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Design and Visualization Move Into New Virtual Worlds

Panelists: Moderator David E. Bowles, director, NASA’s Langley Research Center; August Noevere, aerospace research engineer, Collier Research Corp. — HyperSizer Software; Adam Clark, aerodynamics engineer, Enabling Technology & Research, Boeing Commercial Airplanes; Thomas Convard, technical product manager, Epic Games; Rodney Martin, deputy data sciences group lead, NASA’s Ames Research Center; Rachel Narciso, immersive technology specialist, Ball Aerospace

by Hannah Godofsky, AIAA Communications

Design and visualization environments are changing fast, and digital natives are changing design environments, panelists said Jan. 11 during the “Digital Natives Leading the Digital Transformation in Design and Knowledge Environments” session at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida.

Virtual and augmented reality, analysis-based certification processes, and using video game engines to perform simulations are a few new technologies panelists discussed.

“Virtual reality and augmented reality are here to stay. It’s emerging as an affordable and attainable solution,” said Rachel Narciso, an immersive technology specialist at Ball Aerospace. “As a mechanical engineer, I do a lot of my design on a 2-D screen doing CAD with a mouse and a keyboard. I see a lot of benefit from stepping into a VR headset and doing it with my hands.”

She said VR could be used train workers on cleanroom techniques or to save time and money on business travel by using it as a means to collaborate. Narciso admitted that VR is still limited but emphasized it could be very useful in the space industry.

“If we’re coming up with a new, novel idea, we can’t test that in its exact environment,” she said. “We have to simulate that.”

Panelists said aircraft companies are interested in moving to analysis-based certification processes.

“Airplane certification is one of the largest nonrecurring cost-drivers in a commercial airplane development program,” said Adam Clark, an aerodynamic engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “(Computational fluid dynamics) is going to play an increasing role in the future — using computers instead of having to fly everything. We can move toward simulating a lot of this.”

Thomas Convard, technical project manager at Epic Games, said companies are using the Unreal video game engine to do simulation in technical fields.

“Architects are using the game engine for simulation and VR,” he said, showing demos of gleaming glass condos along the Miami beachfront simulated using the game engine.

Convard explained many customers in aerospace, architecture and automotive are using the Unreal engine because an off-the-shelf product comes with a cost advantage and can be implemented on a larger scale.

“This used to be really expensive software, but now you can go to Best Buy and get a headset and start doing VR at your facility,” he said. “We can do this at a mass scale instead of having one VR center.”

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Crowdsourcing the Future of Aerospace

Panelists: Moderator Jenn Gustetic, program executive of small business innovation research, NASA; Jason Crusan, director, Advanced Exploration Systems Division, NASA; Dustin Fraze, program manager, Information Innovation Office, DARPA; Monsi Roman, program manager, Centennial Challenges, NASA; Chris Frangione, open innovation consultant; Zoe Szajnfarber, associate professor of engineering management and systems engineering and space policy, George Washington University

By Tom Risen, Aerospace America staff reporter (2017-2018)

Organizations like NASA, DARPA and even intelligence agencies are increasingly challenging the professional community or general public to solve technical problems for them — a process known as crowdsourcing. Experts on the Jan. 9 panel “Prizes & Challenges — How Crowdsourcing Can Help Solve Technology Gaps” at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida, described what people need to know when creating or applying for a contest to achieve an out-of-reach scientific goal in aerospace engineering.

The growth of crowdsourcing has led to the creation of several toolkits, such as citizenscience.gov, that help interested parties design a challenge. DARPA has awarded prizes for applicants who helped advance autonomous car research, while NASA’s 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge seeks additive construction technology to help build sustainable housing on missions to Mars.

“Challenges and prizes work best when you define a problem,” said Chris Frangione, a consultant who was formerly the vice president of prize development and execution at the XPRIZE Foundation. “Once you ask for a specific solution, then you hinder innovation.”

A key factor in planning a challenge is what kind of incentives to offer people to solve a seemingly impossible problem, but some people pursue such challenges for the glory of the achievement.

“The No. 1 feedback we hear from our participants is ‘I wanted to solve this because it was hard,’” said Monsi Roman, the program manager of Centennial Challenges at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

The compensation should match the cost of solving the problem to make sure qualified people devote their spare time to completing the challenge, Frangione said.

“Prize design is the most critical element,” he said. “The best thing about prizes is that you get what you incentivize. The worst thing about prizes is that you get what you incentivize.”

To complement or make up for the absence of a large cash reward, an organizer can offer full-time jobs at their company if the resulting career would be prestigious enough. Organizers of challenges will sometimes reserve all rights to the intellectual property of the technology created to for the competition.

Applicants should read the terms and conditions of a challenge, including the intellectual property details, to make sure the challenge would be worth their time and effort, said Jenn Gustetic, program executive of small business innovation research at NASA.

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Big Data Spurs Bedeviling Questions

Panelists: Moderator Joseph Morrison, associate project manager, Transformational Tools and Technologies, NASA’s Langley Research Center; Jandria Alexander, principal, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.; David Keyes, director, Extreme Computing Research Center, King Abdullah University of Science & Technology; Pamela Kobryn, principal aerospace engineer, Structures Technology Branch, Aerospace Vehicles Division, Aerospace Systems Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory; Dimitri Mavris, director, Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology; Mark Valentine, Department of Defense Strategic Initiatives Group, Microsoft

by Michele McDonald, AIAA Communications

An influx of data, driven in part by tiny sensors, is creating a big data transformation that promises to help the aerospace industry get ahead of problems before they happen, panelists discussed Jan. 9 during the “Data, Data Everywhere … the Devil in the Details” session at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida.

Dimitri Mavris, director of the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said the area is so new that no one’s an expert.

“We’re going to make this journey together,” he said.

The panelists said the complex problems big data could help solve are spurring more questions, including how to deal with data reliability, threats, privacy and integration.

“The elephant in the room is obviously the protection of data,” said Pamela Kobryn, a principal aerospace engineer with the Aerospace Systems Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory. “How do we quantify uncertainty?”

Kobryn wondered on calibration and updating models as well as how to run them efficiently enough to have the data in the time frame needed. She said end users are part of the equation.

“Who’s going to be using the predictions, and what are they going to do with them, and what is the time frame?” Kobryn added.

Collecting personal data adds other layers of complexity, Kobryn said, explaining data will need to be managed, archived, stored and adapted over time.

The panelists said in the past decade, some crucial pieces have fallen into place to help big data move into the daily realm.

Mavris said it’s not just one, but many technologies and that a multidisciplinary approach needs to be taken. Key enabling technology includes surrogate modeling techniques, high performance computing, advanced data analytics and visualization, advanced sensing technology, and machine learning, he said.

“The sensing (technology) is actually leading this parade,” Mavris said.

The aerospace industry has the opportunity to dig deeper and apply big data-related technology to current problems, he said.

Digital twins, which mimic their physical counterparts and help predict outcomes, encounter widely varying degrees of complexity within the same industry, Kobryn said, adding the same general concept can be applied to commercial, general and military aviation but that the problems and complexities are vastly different within the areas.

For example, she said, commercial aircraft have fairly predictable variables, but the military operates from austere bases or aircraft carriers and often in harsh conditions. The average age of the U.S. Air Force fleet is pushing 30 years so, Kobryn said, predictive maintenance is essential.

And then there’s space.

“When you talk about space exploration, it’s a completely different story because you don’t have the chance to perform maintenance,” Kobryn continued. “You have one chance to execute the mission … the ideal scenario is to use digital twin technology to design in ultra-high reliability from the start, and while you’re on the mission, you want to be able to use the data you gather to adapt the mission to any risks you identify, and the digital twin would help you identify risks.”

The audience members seemed to think the industry is in the early stages of the big data revolution. They rated data technology as at the “peak of inflated expectations” of the Gartner Hype Cycle, according to an informal poll of those in the room. While some attendees think we’re in the “trough of disillusionment,” others think we’re moving toward the “slope enlightenment.”

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Human-Machine Teaming Transforming Aerospace

Panelists: Moderator Scott Fouse, vice president, Advanced Technology Center, Lockheed Martin; Gerhard Grunwald, head of orbital robotics, Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics; Kris Kearns, senior adviser for autonomy research, Air Force Research Laboratory; Stefanie Tellex, assistant professor of computer science and assistant professor of engineering, Brown University

by Lawrence Garrett, AIAA Web Editor

With computing power rapidly approaching that of the human brain, the availability of low-cost sensors and dramatic improvements in autonomy, human-machine teams and robotics previously found only in science fiction are certain to improve many aspects of life over the next 25 years, a panel of experts said Jan. 12 during the “Serving Our Robot Overlords” session at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida.

“Robots and humans will work effectively together and essentially be a far more effective team than either by themselves and truly demonstrate that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” said Scott Fouse, vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center.

For human-machine teaming technology to mature and provide humanity its full suite of benefits, communication is key, said Gerhard Grunwald, head of orbital robotics at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics in Germany.

Grunwald noted that human-machine communications are divided into two categories: direct and indirect.

“Indirect ones mean human and robot are not in the same location,” he explained, citing the example of a human based on Earth working with an International Space Station-based robot.  “What is so important in space with telerobotics is that the human is in the loop.”

Grunwald said another challenge is the communication delay between Earth and space. He noted that the delay between Earth and the ISS is 20-30 milliseconds.

Because robotics do not behave the same way in space as on Earth, safety tests are being conducted to “ensure robots don’t injure robots in space,” he said.

The U.S. Air Force is also working to overcome a number of challenges presented by human-machine teaming with the aim of getting airmen and machines working together to be efficient and effective, said Kris Kearns, senior adviser for autonomy and research at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

She said one of the Air Force’s primary challenges is to determine how to share decision-making between machines and humans: which decisions humans should always make and which ones are OK for machines to make on their own.

The end goal, Kearns said, is to capitalize on the strengths of what artificial intelligence or an intelligent machine can provide as well as the strengths of airmen.

“This is the basis for which we are developing technologies to be able to have a relationship between the human and the machine so that we have calibrated trust,” Kearns said. “We want joint learning between the machine and the human.”

She said the Air Force is working to develop systems in which an intelligent machine performs more of the tasks required to operate an aircraft, such as takeoff and landing, collision avoidance or route planning.

However, Kearns said humans will always be in the loop when it comes to identifying targets or giving authority to kill.

Stefanie Tellex, assistant professor of computer science and assistant professor of engineering at Brown University, said now is a really exciting time in robotics because they’re starting to work.

Tellex imagines a future in which people talk to robots like they’re other people.

But what’s still needed, she said, is a model for “these language understanding modules to connect everything the robot can see and everything the robot can do.”

To be successful, Tellex cautioned, “We have to in some sense embrace failure.” She said robotics and autonomy are difficult and the world and aerospace are complicated.

“It’s critical … to have the robot be able to identify, detect and recover from failures,” Tellex said. “We want the robot to be able to engage in corrective behavior.”

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Regulatory and Operational Challenges of On-Demand Mobility

Panelists: Moderator Tom Gunnarson, regulatory affairs lead, Zee Aero; Gregory J. Bowles, vice president of global innovation and policy, General Aviation Manufacturers Association; Carl Dietrich, chief technology officer and co-founder, Terrafugia; Eric Mueller, aerospace engineer, NASA’s Ames Research Center; Sasha G. Rao, chair of intellectual property practice, Maynard Cooper & Gale; Wes Ryan, unmanned systems certification lead, FAA

by Lawrence Garrett, AIAA Web Editor

Overcoming regulatory and operational barriers to achieve the dream of high-density urban mobility requires close collaboration between industry, government and academia, along with an incremental and methodical approach, said experts Jan. 10 during the “On-Demand Mobility – Regulatory and Operational Challenges” panel at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida.

Rapid technological advancements in electric vertical takeoff and landing craft, or eVTOLs, and autonomous systems are making future on-demand urban mobility a certainty, panelists said. But, as panel moderator Tom Gunnarson of Zee Aero cautioned: “If we think about the men and women out there who are developing these fantastic machines, there has to be a path set before they can actually realize what they want to do with them.”

Gunnarson suggested the technological challenges posed by urban air mobility are unlikely to be as challenging as regulatory and operational ones.

“The really big bar in all of this may not be the development of the aircraft, but being able to operate it,” he said.

Gregory J. Bowles, vice president of global innovation and policy at the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, wondered about FAA certification for new types of personal aerial vehicles and other autonomous eVTOL aircraft when they don’t fit under the current categories. He said that industry, in collaboration with government, needs to figure out where “we define these vehicles.”

Another significant challenge, Bowles said, is how to train future pilots of these aircraft, as well as what they’ll be trained to do. He noted it’s unlikely these aircraft will be totally autonomous initially.

“Some will have operators; some will have pilots,” Bowles said. “We need to look at what the human pilot does, what automation can do today and where’s that gap; that’s what needs to be trained.”

Wes Ryan, the unmanned systems certification lead for the FAA, said industry and academia should work with the FAA and NASA “to create a purposeful and evolutionary path to address the design of, the testing of, the operation of these pilotless aircraft at some point in the future.”

Carl Dietrich, chief technology officer and co-founder of Terrafugia, a Massachusetts-based company specializing in the development of flying cars expected to hit the market in 2019, said his company’s primary challenges are ensuring a potential market exists — and safety.

“We’re worried about our brand; we’re worried about liability,” he said, adding there are other concerns, such as rate of return, how quickly certification requirements can be determined or how complex a given supply chain may be.

But, Dietrich said, to realize the benefits of a potential market, a key challenge will be overcoming societal fear. He noted that if catastrophic accidents occur in a fully deployed on-demand urban mobility system at the same rate as auto accidents, they would equate to over 6,000 globally in a given year. Minimizing societal fear, Dietrich explained, must be done “at a very, very early stage; otherwise we’re going to be dead in the water as soon as someone gets out there with a vehicle and crashes.”

Airspace integration issues are another significant challenge, said Eric Mueller, an aerospace engineer at the NASA’s Ames Research Center. He noted that while it may be easy dealing with only a handful of aircraft aloft, it will become exponentially more challenging when also dealing with a number of Uber or Voom aircraft that want to share the same airspace.

“We need to have rules for those interactions and really consensus that those are fair rules,” he said. “An incremental or methodical approach to airspace integration, I think, can achieve this high-density urban air mobility operation.”

Sasha G. Rao, an attorney and chair of intellectual property practice at Alabama-based Maynard Cooper & Gale, cited three key legal and policy areas to consider regarding on-demand mobility: operations and infrastructure; how to work within the confines of the current patchwork of federal, state and local laws; and vehicle certification. She said it’s important to build a safety-case for personal aerial vehicles while developing standards that are much better than cars and what people see on the roads.

“And we have to educate the public to gain their acceptance,” Rao said.

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Digital Disruption in Aerospace

Panelists: Moderator Darryll J. Pines, dean of the A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland; Andreas Bernhard, chief engineer, CH-53K, Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.; LaNetra Tate, program executive, Space Technology Mission Directorate, NASA; Jack O’Banion, vice president, Lockheed Martin; Brendan Iribe, co-founder, Oculus

by Tom Risen, Aerospace America staff reporter (2017-2018)

Digital innovation that changed daily life with smartphones and cloud computing is now breaking technical barriers in space and aviation, technologists explained Jan. 8 during the “Digital Transformations Disrupting Aerospace Business Models” panel at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida.

The design process for aircraft is one of the main digital disruptions in the aerospace sector. The CH-53K King Stallion helicopter that Sikorsky is developing for the U.S. Marine Corps is the Lockheed Martin subsidiary’s first production aircraft built with a completely digital, paperless design, said Andreas Bernhard, the helicopter’s chief engineer at Sikorsky. Looking ahead to the 2020s, Bernhardpredicted, “our most profitable product is no longer going to be the Black Hawk, but the CH-53K.” New technologies on the CH-53K also include composite rotor blades that he said “generate enough lift to carry an empty Black Hawk,” a transmission with improved power density than previous generation Sikorsky helicopters, and digital engine controls in the cockpit.

Digital assistants that are becoming more widely used on smartphones also have great potential to guide aerospace engineers. A “Siri for designers” akin to the Apple digital assistant could give real-time feedback on the effect of different options, including materials, said Jack O’Banion, vice president of strategy and customer requirements with Advanced Development Programs at Lockheed Martin.

“There are optimizing routines out there now, but if you’re not careful with the human too far removed from the design loop, you could walk through design choices that you may have preferred to make,” O’Banion said.

NASA is also keeping flexibility in mind when designing its autonomous technology. The semi-autonomous, free-flying robot Astrobee that NASA’s Ames Research Center is developing to assist International Space Station astronauts in tasks like inventory will free up valuable time on the station. The disruptive feature of it, however, is that it can be upgraded with code for scientific tests and improvements from people outside of NASA, said LaNetra Tate, program executive with NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

Virtual reality and augmented reality also have the potential to change aerospace training, design, communication and visualization. Brendan Iribe, co-founder of California-based virtual reality hardware developer Oculus, said the world is at the beginning of a “virtual age,” with the growing availability of devices, including the Oculus Rift headset. In decades to come, he said, rovers on Mars could scan their surroundings to give people a chance at interacting with the red planet in a virtual simulation.

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Aerospace Industry Should Lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Speaker: Naguib Attia, vice president, Global University Programs, IBM

by Lawrence Garrett, AIAA Web Editor

To bring to fruition the full benefits of the digital enterprise business model, a number of challenges still need to be met and there is no sector better-suited for leading this charge than aerospace, said Naguib Attia, vice president of Global University Programs at IBM, Jan. 8 during the “Digital Enterprise Business Models — Their Impact on the Aerospace Industry” session at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida.

The aerospace and defense sector has traditionally led the world with technological ideas, Attia said, citing the automotive industry as one industry that followed aerospace’s lead. He said the industry must work closely with academia to bring about new ideas.

“Aerospace and defense is made up of complex environments with multiple interconnected groups that must work together,” Attia said.

With revolutionary technologies like the “internet of things,” blockchain, the cloud, 3-D printing and quantum computing, eventually there will be one big ecosystem, Attia explained, warning that industry and academia will need to change their way of thinking.

He cited three key challenges, including innovation, recruiting talent, and transforming the enterprise process and systems to better enable competitiveness. These challenges have created an environment in which data has become the core work for aerospace and defense, Attia said.

“Everything is attached; everything is connected; everything is talking to each other,” he said.

Attia shared his vision of a future single system that will be capable of pinpointing many of today’s common issues while also fixing them and improving quality control.

He noted the primary challenge for academia is making the internet of things not just read-only data to be returned for later analysis, but also “a cognitive system” that helps determine which data to select and which to work with. The debate is between how much technology to put at the endpoint, he said, and “how much of that technology can have some cognitive component.”

Attia advised that today’s research should be focused on what kind of technology and intelligent systems are needed and whether that technology should be implemented at the end endpoint, in the cloud or on a server.

He said aerospace and defense can lead in these areas.

“I think aerospace and defense can come with an optimum solution,” he said.

Attia also said that using sensors and cognitive internet of things in production tooling is key.

“You cannot just cut an engine part; you cannot just make things,” he noted, adding the tooling has to be precisely calibrated to perfection.

“You are working with an industry that cannot accept error,” Attia pointed out. “That’s the beauty about the aerospace industry. There’s no room for error because it is fatal; a plane is not a car.”

Attia suggested sensors and cognitive internet of things can help reduce the risk and said that cognitive internet of things has already broken one barrier — blockchain technology. Attia predicted that blockchain will impact the aerospace industry more than other industries.

Noting the financial sector has already created its own blockchain system, Attia said he thinks the aerospace and defense industry should come up with its own system, with defense on one side and civil on the other.

He said if the system comes to fruition, transparency would exist throughout the entire lifecycle of a product, reducing risk at every stage as well as saving time.

Attia also said quantum computing will become more secure and will serve as “the backbone for the digital transformation of the next 10 years.”

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Digital Engineering Transforming Manufacturing

Panelists: Moderator Pamela Kobryn, principal aerospace engineer, Structures Technology Branch, Aerospace Vehicles Division, Aerospace Systems Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory; Brenchley Boden, chief technology officer, Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute, and senior industrial engineer, AFRL; Michael W. Grieves, executive director, Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Innovative Design, Florida Institute of Technology; Brunon “Dave” Kepczynski, chief information officer, GE Global Research, and engineering product leader, GE Digital; John H. Vickers, principal technologist, Space Technology Mission Directorate, NASA; Chuck Ward, chief, Manufacturing and Industrial Technologies Division, Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, AFRL; Caroline Gorski, global partnership director for digital, Rolls-Royce

by Michele McDonald, AIAA Communications Manager

Dawn-of-Digital-Engineering-Panel-SciTech2018
Participants in the Jan. 8 discussion “The Dawn of Digital Engineering” at the 2018 Science and Technology Forum in Kissimmee, Fla.

In the dawn of digital engineering, the challenges are daunting, but the rewards extend far beyond manufacturing, panelists said Jan. 8 during the “The Dawn of Digital Engineering?” forum at the 2018 AIAA SciTech Forum in Kissimmee, Florida.

The panelists said digital engineering could boost efficiency, slash costs, increase agility and reveal problems before production begins. However, they pointed out some challenges, including overcoming cultural biases, navigating through massive amounts of data and figuring out how to retain and make accessible digitized data into the future.

Digital twins and models are disrupting the status quo, though, they said. For example, a digital twin of an airplane can move through its physical counterpart’s entire lifecycle from the design stage to manufacturing to service and support, said Chuck Ward, with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Materials and Manufacturing Directorate.

“You now have a flying laboratory,” Ward said.

Beyond digital twin prototypes, there are digital twin aggregates, said Michael W. Grieves, executive director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Innovative Design at Florida Institute of Technology. He said these aggregates can help engineers predict when equipment needs to be replaced and that it’s all about prognostics and learning so “later versions of a product don’t have to go through the same learning curves as earlier versions.”

Digital twins and digital engineering may help NASA reach Mars and beyond while cutting costs and saving time, said John H. Vickers, principal technologist with NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. The traditional building block approach can take decades and tens of millions of dollars to get equipment into space.

The Department of Defense is shifting to a digital engineering ecosystem from initial research and development all the way to maintenance and eventually retirement, said Pam Kobryn, with the Aerospace Systems Directorate at AFRL. She said the DOD is working with traditional modeling and simulation while leveraging high-performance computing and software networking.

“The dawn of digital engineering — the questions are all around the unknowns,” Korbyn said, adding that the DOD is looking at the portability of the models, value across the lifecycle, how to speed up the pace of delivery and how to provide simple support to complex problems.

And then terabytes of data must be managed. For that, engineers are borrowing from the field of biology and bundling information into packets, similar to the DNA code, Ward said.

“We need to figure out how to learn from all that data,” said Brenchley Boden, chief technology officer of the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute, and senior industrial engineer at AFRL.

The factory floor needs to become more intelligent, he said, adding that sensors could be a solution for older equipment.

In addition, the industry needs to move to an ecosystem approach in which all the functions can be seen at the same time, away from its current focus on parts and subsystem levels, said Brunon “Dave” Kepczynski, chief information officer at GE Global Research and engineering product leader with GE Digital.

Building such an ecosystem means companies need to think beyond their own walls and collaborate with players from across systems, said Caroline Gorski, global partnership director for digital at Rolls-Royce. Industrial “internet of things,” artificial intelligence, advance analytics and blockchain are figuring into the new digital engineering ecosystem.

But, the panelists said, the next generation of engineers may hold the answer.

“They come digitally ready,” Vickers said.

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