DARPA tests robot co-pilot ALIAS

Joel Walker, a test pilot for Aurora Flight Sciences, a maker of autonomous aircraft, flew his small, twin-engine plane through rain squalls here recently, and before it reached 5,000 feet, he pushed a red button on his joystick that transferred control of the plane to his co-pilot. He didn’t have to say a word.The co-pilot’s seat had been replaced by a spiderlike array of rods and wires that were bolted to the steering yoke and foot pedals on the right side of the aircraft.Following instructions sent from a pilot in a remote command center on the ground, the “co-pilot,” which also consisted of a trio of computers wedged in the rear of the aircraft’s passenger compartment, took over the plane’s controls and flawlessly executed a series of maneuvers, including lazy S-turns and changes in altitude.The flight was the first demonstration of ALIAS, a new project of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Its goal is not simply to show that a robot can fly a plane. After all, robot aircraft are no longer novel. Today, the majority of U.S. military aircraft are drones, and commercial aircraft now fly most of their routes on autopilot. The new program’s goal is to use robots to augment, rather than automate, flight.ALIAS, which stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System, is the brainchild of Daniel Patt, an aeronautical engineer and the program manager. Patt is trying to build a tighter bond between human pilots and increasingly powerful computers and sensors.He has taken his inspiration from J.C.R. Licklider, a pioneering DARPA official who described his vision in a seminal 1960 essay titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which envisioned a world in which it would be difficult to distinguish the independent “contributions of human operators and equipment.”For Patt and a growing group of technologists, the idea offers an alternative approach to turning over jobs entirely to robots - one in which systems extend rather than replace human capabilities.An article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review addressed some of the widespread concerns about robots taking away jobs: “What if we were to reframe the situation? What if, rather than asking the traditional question - What tasks currently performed by humans will soon be done more cheaply and rapidly by machines? - we ask a new one: What new feats might people achieve if they had better thinking machines to assist them?”The DARPA program is one such effort to strike a new balance between humans and machines. The defense agency has contracted with three competing aerospace companies to build prototypes of a robot co-pilot.The challenge is to create a robot that can be reconfigured for a new aircraft in a month and installed in place of the co-pilot’s seat in a single day. The system must be able to fly the complete mission, from takeoff to landing, but it is intended to work in concert with a human pilot.“What we would like to do is use the humans for what the humans are really good at and the automation for what the automation is really good at,” said Jessica Duda, a program manager for Aurora Flight Sciences, one of the ALIAS developers.The other two contractors are the giant aerospace firms Lockheed Martin Corp. and Sikorsky Aircraft.UnderdogAgainst its larger competitors, Aurora is an underdog, but it is building its robot co-pilot in cooperation with teams of academic researchers at MIT and Duke University. Based here at a small regional airport, the company grew out of MIT’s human-powered Daedalus aircraft, which flew from Crete to the Greek island of Santorini in 1988.The company’s original goal was to build robotic airplanes for researching climate change. However, it now builds a range of autonomous planes, mostly for the military, because getting funding for research of global warming has proved challenging.Before becoming an ALIAS contractor, Aurora developed the Centaur, which it describes as an “optionally piloted aircraft.” In the recent demonstration, the robot co-pilot was taken from the original Centaur design, and it was controlled with software for the ALIAS program.The Centaur DA42 was originally designed as both an experimental system - its first customer was the Swiss military - as well as an aircraft that could be flown remotely, without human pilots in the cockpit, to different locations.AndroidWhen the ALIAS robot hardware is complete, it will be possible to quickly install the robot in a variety of airplanes - even the back seat of a jet fighter - and experiment with different ways to share the task of flying a plane between humans and robots. For example, a human pilot will be able to communicate with the robot co-pilot with an Android tablet computer or eventually with speech synthesis and recognition. The instrumentation in today’s aircraft offers a variety of electronic checklists, but they are poorly designed and often unused by pilots, Aurora engineers said.In its ALIAS system, Aurora is developing ways to make the checklist an organic part of the control of the aircraft. For example, in the case of engine failure, ALIAS system will be designed to recognize the situation and automatically present the pilot with relevant information as well as a list of steps necessary to control the aircraft.Eventually, the system will watch over all cockpit operations, both with electronic sensors and cameras, and have the ability to alert human pilots to any missteps.“This is a different paradigm than the way we treat aviation today,” Patt said. To imagine a robot as a team member would be a departure from today’s use of automated systems, he added.“This shows the evolution of the historical development of artificial intelligence,” said John S. Langford, Aurora’s chief executive. “The vision of 20 years ago about what machine intelligence would look like hasn’t come true.”--2015 New York Times News Service