Dr. Peng Wei (MAE) has won a five-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award for the project “Safe and Scalable Learning-based Control for Autonomous Air Mobility.” A key challenge remains unanswered to make autonomous air mobility (AAM) a reality: how can we design and build a scalable AAM ecosystem to enable safety-critical autonomous flight operations in high-density, dynamic, and stochastic urban airspace environments? This project aims to develop methods and validated tools that can enable safe and scalable learning-based AAM. Dr. Wei will address this challenge through research areas in autonomy, control, machine learning and safety. The research could impact the way that other safety-critical, multi-agent systems are designed and implemented to support increasing autonomy and unmanned operations in civil aviation, autonomous cars/trucks, and robotics. The research findings will provide benchmarks to the FAA, NASA, Boeing, and Collins Aerospace to establish regulations and guidebooks for advanced air mobility pilot training, airspace design, fleet operations, and aircraft certification.
In this GW Today profile, Dr. Wei discusses similar research he is conducting and how artificial intelligence is changing the future of air transportation.