Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) that can safely navigate through crowded airspace – the first system of its kind to be able to do so.
This could pave the way for fully autonomous aircraft operating in busy areas.
According to the team, from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, the AI pilot is able to avoid collision, predict the intentions of other aircraft, coordinate their movements, and communicate verbally with other pilots and air traffic controllers.
The intention is to create an AI with a performance that’s indistinguishable from that of an experienced human pilot.
The AI uses a combination of vision and natural language processing to communicate with pilots and controllers, producing safe and socially compliant navigation.
To achieve this, the researchers trained the AI on a range of data, including images of aircraft, patterns of air traffic, and radio transmissions from the Allegheny County Airport and the Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport.
For its visual input, the AI relies on six cameras and a computer vision system that is able to detect any nearby aircraft in much of the same way that a human pilot would.
Natural language processing allows the AI to communicate
The AI can also communicate verbally by using natural language processing techniques to power an automatic speech recognition function.
This allows it to understand incoming messages, and it can also relay its own spoken communications.
These advances are important if autonomous vehicles are to operate in increasingly crowded volumes of airspace.
Autopilot controls are now common among aircraft such as commercial airliners that fly at high altitudes and in comparatively sparsely populated airspace using instrument flight rules (IFR) – a set of regulations under which a pilot operates an aircraft in conditions that are not clear enough to see where they are going.
There are different challenges involved in developing an AI that is able to work within the often crowded and pilot-controlled traffic operating at lower altitudes under visual flight rules (VFR).
The new AI developed by the team at Carnegie Mellon has not yet been taken to the skies but has performed well in simulator tests.
These involved using two flight simulators – one piloted by a human and the other by the AI.
They found that the AI was able to operate effectively in the same airspace, even if the human is not an experienced pilot.
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