Roundtable with Dr. Ella Atkins
Dr. Ella Atkins will give a seminar in the AME Department on March 24 and her talk is titled "Environment Mapping and Flight Planning for Advanced Air Mobility". She is very well-known in UAS autonomy and traffic management, and is interested in meeting with members of the Drone Discussion Group. Her host is Dr. Hossein Rastgoftar from the department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering.
I will host a roundtable discussion for members of our group interested in meeting with Dr. Atkins this Thursday in AME conference room N715 from 10-11 AM.
Bio: Dr. Ella Atkins is a Professor in the University of Michigan’s Aerospace Engineering Department where she directs the Autonomous Aerospace Systems (A2SYS) Lab and is Associate Director of the Robotics Institute. Dr. Atkins holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. She is an AIAA Fellow, private pilot, and Part 107 UAS pilot. She served on the National Academy’s Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and the Institute for Defense Analysis Defense Science Studies Group. She has served on several National Academy study committees and co-authored study reports including Advancing Aerial Mobility A National Blueprint (2020) and Autonomy Research for Civil Aviation Toward a New Era of Flight (2014). Dr. Atkins has built a research program in decision-making and control to assure safe contingency management in manned and unmanned Aerospace applications. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems (JAIS) and a member of the 2020-2021 AIAA Aviation Conference Executive Steering Committee.
Dr Atkins' talk will be at 4PM in AME S202
Title: Environment Mapping and Urgent Landing Planning for Low-Altitude UAS Operations
Abstract: Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) are expected to proliferate in low-altitude airspace over the coming decade requiring flight near buildings and over people. Robust urgent landing capabilities including landing site selection are required. However, conventional fixed-wing emergency landing sites such as open fields and empty roadways are rare in and around cities. Our work uniquely considers a city's many unoccupied flat rooftops as possible nearby landing sites. We propose novel methods to identify flat rooftop buildings, isolate their flat surfaces, and find touchdown points that maximize distance to obstacles. We model flat rooftop surfaces as polygons that capture their boundaries and obstructions. We process satellite images, airborne LiDAR point clouds, and map building outlines to generate rooftop maps with a multi-stage machine learning pipeline. We propose a computational geometry method (Polylidar3D) that reliably extracts flat rooftop surfaces from archived data sources. We model risk as an innovative combination of landing site and path risk metrics and conduct a multi-objective Pareto front analysis for sUAS urgent landing in cities. A high-fidelity simulated city is constructed in the Unreal game engine with a statistically-accurate representation of rooftop obstacles. A summary of complementary research in contingency planning and airspace geofencing will conclude the presentation.