Register for a range of sessions:
NSF Connection: Developing the Autonomous Technologies Highly Skilled Technical Workforce
12:00 PM – 12:45 PM ET
As the first national NSF ATE center in autonomous technologies, NCAT is crafting, adapting, and implementing educational resources to help two-year college faculty and other educators meet workforce demands while increasing the quality and diversity of technicians. Developing the skilled technical workforce is critical to cultivating the potential of autonomous technologies. A recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, predicts a shortfall of nearly 3.4 million skilled technical workers by 2022.
NCAT leaders are drawing on their extensive experience developing replicable instructional models and are utilizing best practices to recruit underrepresented populations and support their entry to STEM careers. NCAT is also a catalyst for research on the knowledge and skills technicians need as job titles and work assignments shift. This panel will discuss best practices for bringing together multidisciplinary activities, preparing communities to interact with autonomous technologies and encourage individuals to pursue careers in these emerging technologies.
These topics include:
- Leading professional development for educators and industry professionals.
- Inspiring opportunities for autonomous technologies in STEM education.
- Connecting workforce and community stakeholders to enhance programs and workplaces.
- Building the resource hub serving as the source for curriculum, interactive content, applications, and exchange of ideas.
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Unearthing the Subterranean Environment
1:00 PM – 1:45 PM ET
Complex underground settings present significant challenges for civilian and military first responders. Difficult terrain, unstable structures, degraded environmental conditions, severe communication constraints, and expansive areas of operation make it difficult and dangerous for personnel to rapidly and safely map, navigate, and search underground environments like tunnels, underground urban settings (metros), and natural cave networks during time-sensitive emergency disaster response scenarios and combat situations. To save lives, we need to partner with robots and autonomous systems to be successful through those extreme environments–saving lives when time matters. How much have we progressed to-date? What challenges remain for roboticists and software engineers? How has human machine teaming advanced? What are the next steps for this technology?
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True Integration into the NAS – The Chesapeake UAS Route Network
2:00 PM – 2:45 PM ET
Many efforts have been taken on to demonstrate limited use cases and specific technologies, but very few are aiming at true non-segregated, on-demand, BVLOS and flight over people integrations of UAS into the National Airspace System. This effort is driving specifically at that goal, and the technologies, procedures, certifications, policies and public acceptance aspects are all critical to its success.
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Intelligent Real-Time Scheduling, Dispatching and Monitoring System for Unmanned Vehicles
3:00 PM – 3:45 PM ET
A considerable amount of research effort is focused on unmanned vehicle on-board intelligent technology and not enough is done to ensure that unmanned aircraft and road vehicles are intelligently scheduled and dispatched and then monitored during operation. This presentation reports on the author’s research into requirements for scheduling, dispatching and monitoring unmanned aircraft and road vehicles and his novel architecture of a system which meets these requirements.
The proposed system is based on complex adaptive technology and features emergent digital intelligence.
