Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2017

City

Dayton

Abstract

NASA’s Safe Autonomous Systems Operations (SASO) project goal is to define and safely enable all future airspace operations by justifiable and optimal autonomy for advanced air, ground, and connected capabilities. This work showcases how Increasingly Autonomous Systems (IAS) could create operational transformations beneficial to the enhancement of civil aviationsafety and efficiency. One such IAS under development is the Traffic Data Manager (TDM). This concept is a prototype ‘intelligent party-line’ system that would declutter and parse out non-relevant air traffic, displaying only relevant air traffic to the aircrewin a digital data communications (DataComm) environment. As an initial step, over 22,000 data points were gathered from 31 Airline Transport Pilots to train the machine learning algorithms designed tomimic human expertsand expertise. The test collection used an analog of the Navigation Display. Pilotswere asked to rate the relevancy of the displayed traffic using an interactive tabletapplication. Pilots were also asked to rank the order of importance of the information given, to better weight the variables within the algorithm. They were also asked if the information given was enough data, and more importantly the “right” data to best inform the algorithm. The paper will describe the findings and their impact to the further development of the algorithm for TDM and, in general, address the issue of how can we train supervised machine learning algorithms, critical to increasingly autonomous systems, with the knowledge and expertise of expert human pilots.

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