Students and faculty in the Department of Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering are some of the more prolific researchers in the Embry-Riddle family. The department's research expenditures are nearly one-half those of the entire College of Engineering, with support from federal agencies including NSF, FAA, and NOAA as well as industry partners. The department is heavily involved in projects managed by ERAU's NEAR Lab and by the COE's Eagle Flight Research Center.
Strategic department research directions include three areas critical for the future of aerospace. These are:
- Detect and avoid technologies for unmanned aircraft systems;
- Assured systems for aerospace, including cybersecurity and development assurance;
- Modeling and simulation for aviation and aerospace.
Detect and avoid technologies enable unmanned aircraft systems to "see and be seen" by other aircraft and by air traffic controllers on the ground. Of particular challenge is detect and avoid of uncooperative aircraft, those aircraft that aren't equipped to announce their position either automatically or in response to interrogations from the ground.
Assured systems are those that are robust in the face of cybersecurity challenges, with assured development being system design approaches that yield assured systems without high overhead.
Modeling and simulation for aviation involves everything from the logistics of getting passengers onto aircraft to planning how to get all air traffic around predicted bad weather without upsetting arrival times and locations.
ASSURE A55
PI Richard Stansbury
PI Christopher Herbster
The aviation industry uses flight data recorders (FDR) and cockpit voice recorders (CVR) to investigate accidents and incidents. FDRs record sensor data to provide information about an aircraft’s technical status, while CVRs record sounds from the cockpit to draw conclusions through crew communications and environmental sounds.
The aviation industry uses flight data recorders (FDR) and cockpit voice recorders (CVR) to investigate accidents and incidents. FDRs record sensor data to provide information about an aircraft’s technical status, while CVRs record sounds from the cockpit to draw conclusions through crew communications and environmental sounds. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Unmanned Aircraft Systems Standardization Collaborative (UASSC) standardization roadmap v2.0 indicates that there are significant gaps regarding these flight recorders for UAS. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to close these gaps and define appropriate requirements for FDR and CVR for UAS in the national airspace.
The project is divided into subtasks. The first major step is the literature review of current data recorder standards, technologies, and their requirements for UAS and UAM aircraft. The requirements of various government organizations and institutions are analyzed in this step. The next step is to examine the requirements found. Within this task, it is investigated how applicable the existing requirements are to various categories of UAS. If there are problems adapting these requirements, the corresponding standards will be adjusted. The research will especially focus on test procedures for crash survival, methods for data recording, and the minimum data required.
Researchers
-
- Department
- Applied Aviation Sciences Department
- Degrees
-
Ph.D., M.S., Florida State University
-
- Department
- Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept
- Degrees
-
Ph.D., M.S., B.S., University of Kansas