Model Airplanes

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This story is a selection from the August issue of Air Space magazine

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Article source: https://www.airspacemag.com/airspacemag/career-built-on-flying-models-180972598/

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has devised a new approach to automatically design a mode-free, model-agnostic, AI-driven controller for any hybrid UAV. The team will present their novel computational controller design at SIGGRAPH 2019, held 28 July-1 August in Los Angeles. This annual gathering showcases the world’s leading professionals, academics, and creative minds at the forefront of computer graphics and interactive techniques.

To control hybrid UAVs, one system directs the vehicle’s copter-model rotors for hovering and a different one directs plane-model rotors for speed and distance. Indeed, controlling hybrid UAVs is challenging due to the complexity of the flight dynamics of the vehicle. Typically, controllers have been designed manually and are a time-consuming process.

In this work, the team addressed how to automatically design one single controller for the different flight modes (copter mode, gliding mode, transition, etc.) and how to generalize the controller design method for any UAV model, shape, or structure.

“Designing a controller for such a hybrid design requires a high level of expertise and is labor intensive,” says Jie Xu of MIT and coauthor of the research. “With our automatic controller design method, any non-expert could input their new UAV model to the system, wait a few hours to compute the controller, and then have their own customized UAVs fly in the air. This platform can make hybrid UAVs far more accessible to everyone.”

The researchers’ method consists of a neural network-based controller design trained by reinforcement learning techniques. In

Article source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190716124833.htm

U.S. government officials in 2014 revealed an alarming safety issue: Passenger cellphones and other types of radio signals could pose a crash threat to some models of Boeing 737 and 777 airplanes.

More than 1,300 jets registered in the U.S. were equipped with cockpit screens vulnerable to interference from Wi-Fi, mobile phones and even outside frequencies such as weather radar, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which gave airlines until November 2019 to replace the units made by Honeywell International Inc.

Today, potentially hundreds of planes worldwide are still flying with the unsafe systems cited in the FAA report. Flight-critical data including airspeed, altitude and navigation could disappear and “result in loss of airplane control at an altitude insufficient for recovery,” the FAA said in the safety bulletin, known as an airworthiness directive.

Honeywell hasn’t heard of any display screens blanking out because of cellphones or other radio interference while an airplane was in flight, spokeswoman Nina Krauss said. While airlines and Honeywell argued that radio signals were unlikely to cause safety problems during flight, though, the FAA countered that it had run tests on in-service planes — and the jets flunked.

Boeing Co. found the interference in a laboratory test in 2012 but hasn’t seen similar issues on other aircraft, a company spokesman said. Honeywell is aware of only one case when all six display units in a 737 cockpit went blank, Krauss said. The cause was a software problem that has been fixed and is currently being

Article source: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-07-18/cellphones-a-flight-danger-on-these-boeing-jets