Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Safety and Certification Issues in Learning-Enabled Systems: An Urban Air Mobility Case Study

Natasha Neogi , Research scientist at NASA Langley

Abstract

On-demand urban air mobility (UAM) has the potential to revolutionize transportation in smart cities across the globe. An integrated mobility solution, that leverages a coordinated multi-modal transportation system, along with infrastructure for connectivity and localization in municipalities, will act to invigorate the local economy and ease gridlock. However, the scale required for UAM necessitates a shift in the piloting paradigm currently seen in aviation. The ability to leverage learning-enabled autonomous systems that collaborate with humans to operate in the airspace may ease this problem. In order to develop confidence in these systems, assurance technologies need to be integrated into the design process in order to guarantee safe behavior. In this talk, we explore the integration of formal methods based methodologies with learning systems representations to enable verification of dynamic changes in knowledge representation. We explore the generation and representation of knowledge in the cognitive architecture Soar and then translate it into a formal verification environment, Uppaal, whereby required safety and liveness properties can be checked. We illustrate our approach using a simplified UAM operational scenario, involving flight under lost link conditions over populous areas. Bio Dr. Natasha Neogi is currently a member of NASA’s Urban Air Mobility Coordination and Assessment Team, as well as a research scientist at NASA Langley supporting the System Wide Safety, Transformative Tools and Technologies—Autonomous Systems, and Air Traffic Management-eXploration Projects. Prior to this, she was a staff scientist at the Office of the Chief Scientist, NASA Headquarters. Her primary research interests are in the verification and validation of software-intensive safety-critical infrastructure systems, as well as certification issues concerning airworthiness of UAS. She received a M.Phil in Physics from Cambridge University in Cambridge, UK, and then received her Ph.D. in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is an associate fellow of the AIAA, and was the recipient of the AIAA Robert A. Mitcheltree and PEC Doug P. Ensor Young Engineer awards.