The
machine, a bit like R2D2, will have many of the skills of a human
pilot, including the ability to land the plane and to take off. It will
assist the human pilot on routine flights and be able to take over the
flight in emergency situations.
A
number of aerospace companies and universities, in three competing
teams, are working with Darpa to develop the robot. The agency plans for
the robot co-pilot to be “visually aware” in the cockpit and to be able
to control the aircraft by manipulating equipment built for human
hands, such as the pilot’s yoke and pedals, as well as the various
knobs, toggles and buttons.
Ideally,
the robots will rely on voice recognition technologies and speech
synthesis to communicate with human pilots and flight controllers.
“This
is really about how we can foster a new kind of automation structured
around augmenting the human,” said Daniel Patt, a program manager in
Darpa’s Tactical Technology Office.
NASA
is exploring a related possibility: moving the co-pilot out of the
cockpit on commercial flights, and instead using a single remote
operator to serve as co-pilot for multiple aircraft.
In
this scenario, a ground controller might operate as a dispatcher
managing a dozen or more flights simultaneously. It would be possible
for the ground controller to “beam” into individual planes when needed
and to land a plane remotely in the event that the pilot became
incapacitated — or worse.
What
the Germanwings crash “has done has elevated the question of should
there or not be ways to externally control commercial aircraft,” said
Mary Cummings, the director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at
Duke University and a former Navy F-18 pilot, who is a researcher on the
Darpa project.
“Could
we have a single-pilot aircraft with the ability to remotely control
the aircraft from the ground that is safer than today’s systems? The
answer is yes.”
NASA
would like to see fewer humans guiding planes on the ground, too. This
month, in a research laboratory here, agency officials ran a simulation
of new software intended to bring more automation to the nation’s air
traffic control system, specifically to help with congestion and spacing
of aircraft.
Last
month at the NASA Ames facility, retired air traffic controllers and
commercial pilots sat at air traffic control terminals and helped
scientists test the system as it simulated air traffic arriving in
Phoenix.
The
software, known as Terminal Sequencing and Spacing, can coordinate the
speed and separation of hundreds of aircraft simultaneously to improve
the flow of planes landing at airports. Ultimately, NASA says, it may be
able to increase the density of air traffic in the nation’s skies by as
much as 20 percent — with fewer human controllers.
Indeed,
the potential savings from the move to more autonomous aircraft and air
traffic control systems is enormous. In 2007, a research report for
NASA estimated that the labor costs related to the co-pilot position
alone in the world’s passenger aircraft amounted to billions of dollars
annually.
Automating
that job may save money. But will passengers ever set foot on plane
piloted by robots, or humans thousands of miles from the cockpit?
“You
need humans where you have humans,” said Dr. Cummings. “If you have a
bunch of humans on an aircraft, you’re going to need a Captain Kirk on
the plane. I don’t ever see commercial transportation going over to
drones.”
In
written testimony submitted to the Senate last month, the Air Line
Pilots Association warned, “It is vitally important that the pressure to
capitalize on the technology not lead to an incomplete safety analysis
of the aircraft and operations.”
