Tag: Danette Allen

Researchers Discuss Need for Teamwork Between Humans and Machines

Panelists: Moderator Dale Richards, senior research fellow in human factors, Coventry University; Danette Allen, senior technologist, Intelligent Flight Systems, NASA; Andrew Lacher, senior principal and unmanned and autonomous research strategist, The MITRE Corp.; David Mindell, founder and CEO, Humatics Corp., and professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

by Hannah Godofsky, AIAA Communications

The relationship between humans and machines is changing to one in which humans and machines need to work as a team, a panel of experts said June 7 at the 2017 AIAA AVIATION Forum in Denver.

“Any place where we’re transitioning from automation to autonomy is an opportunity to team between multi-agents, humans and machines in the system,” said Danette Allen, a NASA senior technologist for Intelligent Flight Systems and head of the autonomy incubator at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

She said NASA needs automation.

“All of these new missions have one thing in common, whether they’re Earth-bound or space-bound or planetary-bound, they all need very complex automation and perhaps even autonomy to succeed,” Allen said. “Because we’re talking about distances beyond cislunar. We’re talking about high-latency, very cluttered environment — safety-critical, time-critical systems and decisions that have to be made in uncertainty.”

Andy Lacher, a senior principal at The MITRE Corp., elaborated on human and machine teamwork.

“What we’re really talking about is a partnership, where the human is the senior partner, but the human and the machine have to work together,” he said.

But, he stressed, the human has to be alert and aware in order for a partnership to be safe and reliable.

“The key here is the human can’t be the safety net for the automation,” Lacher said. “The human has to remain vigilant, because when the machine can’t handle it, it hands it back to the human. And sometimes it’s at the most critical or the hardest part.”

Lacher cited examples like automated driving features or underwater robotic exploration to explain why humans need to stay aware even when some aspects of machine operation have been automated.

David Mindell, founder and CEO of Humatics Corp., said there are benefits of working with automated systems as a team.

“Computer chess programs learned how to beat people more than a decade ago,” he explained. “But actually today, the best chess players are people with computers, and they can beat either computers or people alone.”

Mindell gave an example of archeologists who at first were skeptical of a role for automation and robotics in their field but later came to embrace autonomous data collection for their studies.

“We gave them a level of overview of a problem that they couldn’t get in a different way,” he said.

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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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Enhancing Aerospace Capabilities With Computing, Robots and Automation

Panelists: Moderator Samantha Marquart Brainard, doctoral candidate, George Washington University; Danette Allen, senior technologist for intelligent flight systems, NASA’s Langley Research Center; Neil Gershenfeld, director, The Center for Bits and Atoms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Rob High, IBM Fellow and vice president and chief technology officer, IBM Watson; Robert Lutwak, program manager, Microsystems Technology Office, DARPA

by Hannah Godofsky, AIAA Communications

Machines are capable of doing more with less input from humans and will soon be able to assemble other structures or machines, inevitably opening up new possibilities for aerospace, a panel of experts said Jan. 12 at the 2017 AIAA SciTech Forum in Grapevine, Texas.

Danette Allen, senior technologist for intelligent flight systems at NASA’s Langley Research Center, has worked at NASA for decades. In the “Disruptive Technology Developments — Breakthroughs That Will Transform Aerospace” panel, she said over the past 30 years, technology has changed in a myriad of ways. She mentioned autonomy as one of those changes and said it is altering not only the way humans and computers interact, but also aerospace.

“We’re at the dawn of what a lot of people call an autonomy revolution,” she said. “When we talk about these systems that learn, when we talk about these systems that adapt, we are changing the way we talk about the way humans interact with these machines.”

For example, humans can now delegate their responsibilities to computers or team up with them.

“A lot of this stuff is spinning in from our mobile devices, speech recognition … from gaming, we’ve got gesture recognition,” said Rob High, IBM Fellow and vice president and chief technology officer of IBM Watson. “It is our firm belief that cognitive computing will have its greatest value and most disruptive benefit when we use it to amplify human cognition.”

High said the ultimate goal is for cognitive computing to become capable of focusing on human experiences and expression to be able to understand intention and then to use that understanding to solve problems and consider alternative solutions.

“We simply cannot consume all of the information that is available to us,” he said. “We need something like a cognitive computing system that is able to facilitate and augment our own reasoning.”

Robert Lutwak, a program manager at DARPA, said advancements in computer hardware as a disruptive development could accelerate the advance of cognitive computing and autonomy.

“On-chip optical frequency control [is] the key disruptive device technology that’s coming along right now,” he said. “In the near future, within the next six months, we’re going to have prototype single-chip optical frequency digital synthesizers.”

In regards to the impact on aerospace, MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld said automation and robotics could lead to self-assembling structures. He added that future space explorers could utilize automation to build habitats.

“An ensemble of little robots can build scalable big structures,” he explained. “To make large-scale space structures, you can flat-pack them and have a little ensemble of assemblers with the flat-pack structure that then scales to a big thing.”

Gershenfeld also described a future aircraft assembly line in which the airframes are assembled from small pieces by robots.

“We’re working on this to make airframes without the supply chain,” he said.

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