Last week, Aurora Flight Sciences’s Autonomous Aerial Cargo Utility System (AACUS) achieved a major operational milestone when it successfully delivered cargo to US Marines in the Integrated Training Exercise at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms in California.
In April, NASA took another major step toward reintroducing supersonic flight with an award to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company to design, build, and test a supersonic aircraft to reduce sonic boom.
According to officials, the USAF will select a new trainer aircraft by September 30 – before the end of the 2018 fiscal year. The aircraft will be one of the three remaining next-gen trainer candidates from the USAF’s ongoing T-X competition, either the Boeing/Saab T-X, Lockheed Martin/KAI T-50A, or Leonardo DRS T-100.
Boeing has successfully completed the first suite of synchronized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight tests using new onboard autonomous command and control technology developed by the company in Australia.
Uber’s Pittsburgh-based Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) has joined the Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium (AVSC) to collaborate on the development of best safety practices for automated vehicles (AVs). AVSC member companies like SAE international, Ford, General Motors, Toyota, and now Uber, aim to responsibly evolve technology that would enable widespread AV deployment.
For ADAS and AV applications, the parameters of safe operation will depend largely on the vehicle’s sensor and processing system’s ability to accurately gather and interpret data about the surrounding environment. Thus, clearly defining a safety feature’s intended ODD also highlights required levels of sensor performance.