Event

LM Robotics Seminar: Unlock the Personal Sky - Safe and Assured Autonomy for On-Demand Urban Air Mob

Friday, February 14, 2020
2:00 p.m.
2121 JM Patterson
Ania Picard
301 405 4358
appicard@umd.edu

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar

Unlock the Personal Sky - Safe and Assured Autonomy for On-Demand Urban Air Mobility

Peng Wei
Assistant Professor
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
The George Washington University

Abstract
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an envisioned air transportation concept, where intelligent flying machines could safely and efficiently transport passengers and cargo within urban areas by rising above traffic congestion on the ground. Aircraft companies such as Boeing, Airbus, Bell, Embraer, Joby, Kitty Hawk, Pipistrel, and Volocopter are building and testing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) to ensure UAM becomes an integral part of the daily life. Meanwhile, in order to make the UAM operations scalable, new airspace management concepts for highly dynamic and dense air traffic are being studied by NASA, FAA, Uber, Airbus, Embraer, etc. How can we design and build a real-time, trustworthy, safety-critical autonomous UAM ecosystem to enable large-scale flight operations in high-density, dynamic and complex urban airspace environments? In this talk, the speaker will present studies to address this critical research challenge from areas in autonomy, control, machine learning, and safety. Our multidisciplinary approach is based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning.

Host

Derek Paley

Biography
Peng Wei is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University. By contributing to the intersection of control, optimization, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, he develops autonomy and decision support tools for aeronautics, aviation, and aerial robotics. His current focus is on safety, efficiency, and scalability of decision making systems in complex, uncertain and dynamic environments. Recent applications include: Air Traffic Control/Management (ATC/M), Airline Operations, UAS Traffic Management (UTM), eVTOL Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and Autonomous Drone Racing (ADR). He is leading the Intelligent Aerospace Systems Lab (IASL). He received his Ph.D. degree in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University in 2013. He is an associate editor for AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems. He also serves in advisory boards for Airbus UTM and NASA Ames Research Center.