Imagine it. You leave your house, coffee in hand, headed to work in the morning. Instead of jumping in your car, waiting in traffic and groaning at construction detours, you hop into a small, unmanned aerial drone and zoom off, leaving behind, or below, those impatient speeders, late workers and all the headaches of your morning commute. This sort of traffic-less utopia might not be so far off.
Dayton, and Ohio more generally, has always been lauded for its innovations in aviation. But, the problems faced by the aviation engineers of the past are very different from the problems they face today. Orville and Wilbur Wright found solutions to problems of mechanical engineering and physics. How on earth will we get this massive thing off the ground? Today, that’s no longer the hurdle. Today, commercial jets and airliners and private biplanes and helicopters fill the sky. We’ve leaped the hurdle of making some massive steel boat float on air but they have always needed a pilot, a person behind the wheel. Now, we want to take the pilot out of the equation. Today, we want planes to fly themselves.
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Wright State was recently awarded $150,000 in funding from the Ohio Federal Research Network, part of a larger $2 million project, to develop the technologies necessary to make aerial vehicles autonomous. Yong Pei, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is heading up the project.
“We want the project to do two things,” Pei said. “First, we want to maintain Ohio’s leadership in aviation, and second, we want to develop the talent and workforce necessary to make the shift toward autonomous vehicles.”
“Today, the problems in aviation aren’t as much about mechanical and electrical engineering,” Pei said. “The problems today are about how to control these vehicles autonomously, to be able to intelligently identify different situations and control them accordingly and to let the vehicle, as much as possible, make the decisions themselves.”
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The funding comes alongside a push toward redefining what it means to work in computer science. Pei’s group includes a few senior undergraduate and graduate students. He wants to encourage more computer science students to consider applications to transportation as a field for students.
“Traditionally, computer scientists work for Google, they work on developing the web and things like that, but there is now a very different domain in transportation, aviation, in health care,” Pei said. “More and more we develop these types of technologies to help address efficiency issues, to help improve productivity and overcome human limitations within these disciplines.”
