AIC Seminar Series

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) are increasingly seen as critical for long-duration surveillance missions, observing locations lacking ground-based human or electronic sensing. In many cases, the number of uncovered locations will far exceed the number of airborne assets available to observe with. The problem of deciding how to effectively deploy airborne sensing assets in changing mission conditions has been explored as part of the Autonomous Rotorcraft Project, a NASA/Army collaborative effort aimed at developing practical, versatile airborne sensing capabilities. The talk will describe the project, emphasizing the development of intelligent autonomy capabilities for optimal surveillance planning and mission execution. It will also describe Apex, an open-source autonomy framework and development toolkit that provides autonomous mission-level planning and execution capabilities for the rotorcraft project and other applications (see http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/projects/apex/).

Michael Freed received his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Northwestern University. He is currently a senior research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center and the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. He leads the Apex Autonomy Toolkit project and supports users in government, industry and academia. He is also autonomy lead for two UAS efforts: the Autonomous Rotorcraft Project and the Intelligent Mission Management project. Dr. Freed’s research interests include intelligent autonomy, cognitive architectures and making autonomy technology more usable and more trustworthy to developers, users and stakeholders.

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