Register for a range of sessions:
Integrating UAM Airspace within ATM and UTM
12:00 PM – 12:45 PM ET
Today’s legacy airspace will need to adapt and connect to new entrants in a way that requires regulatory, technology and policy discussions to ensure safe and efficient movement of all users of the mixed-use, heterogenous airspace. Amit Ganjoo will share a unique perspective as the Founder/CEO of ANRA Technologies, a provider of airspace management technology that has been deployed for numerous UAM and UTM projects for NASA, FAA, and Civil Aviation Authorities in the UK, Europe and Asia. He will discuss the role of a Provider of Services for UAM (PSU) for Advanced Air Mobility as well as UAS Service Supplier (USS) within the Air Traffic Management ecosystem. Amit will share his insights as a standards Co-chair while working alongside Civil Aviation Authorities and Air Navigation Service Providers and will provide a snapshot of ongoing projects with a peek into future for managing airspace.
Automated Testing and Cloud-Simulation for Assured Autonomy
1:00 PM – 1:45 PM ET
Robotic and Autonomous Systems are becoming more prevalent and integrated into our everyday lives. Robots help us complete housework, fight fires, manage warehouse inventory, automate manufacturing, and simulate lunar landscapes, as well as providing companionship. These autonomous systems have become even more relevant during a global health crisis, when robots play a critical role in disinfecting hospitals, airports, and other public places. While the diversity of robot applications is greatly expanding, these breakthroughs demand expensive physical testing to ensure robots perform in complex real-world environments. In this session, we will discuss how to assure safety and quality of autonomous software that drives robotic devices. We will dive deep into how to use large scale parallel simulations to verify and validate autonomous systems, and illustrate the value via two case studies. The first is the case study on simulating and testing robots that disinfect hospitals. We demonstrate how you can use cloud simulation to manage your CI/CD pipeline to build robust robotics applications. Second case study demonstrates how to use cloud simulations to build a robot application that can make real-time decisions using the machine learning (ML) inference results, helping assure safety and compliance in industrial settings.
Security, Simulation & QA – The Keys Towards a Secure, Robust and Resilient Autonomy
1:00 PM – 1:45 PM ET
When we think of the autonomous systems of the future, what springs to mind? Goods delivered to your door by drone, or maybe self-flying taxis that take you from A to B. But what comes to mind when we consider the building blocks to get to this future? In this presentation Arnaud Thiercelin will outline that for society to enjoy secure, robust, and resilient autonomy, there are three keys that we need to get us there – security, simulation, and QA.
Defining Appropriate Cyber Security Requirements – A Risk Based Approach
2:00 PM – 2:45 PM ET
This year’s Xponential theme is “Assured Autonomy”. Without assurance, trust in UAS safety and correct operation is constrained, impeding broad deployment and adoption and hindering proving UAS benefits for society. Foundational to this fabric of trust is that this technology must be robust, secure, and resilient at all levels. An operator who does not take appropriate cyber security precautions becomes the proverbial “weak link” in security creating an exploitable “back door” into the wider UAS ecosystem. Since this ecosystem depends on digital and machine-to-machine communications, the human who traditionally provides a level of resilience may no longer be present and thus their role must be replaced by technology, policy, and processes – requirements for which need to be proportionate to risk and appropriate for the operation. A Joint Authorities for Rulemaking on Unmanned Systems working group has developed a “Cyber SORA” – a methodology allowing UAS operators to perform such a risk assessment from a cyber standpoint and build in risk proportionate safeguards against cyber threats to their UAS operations as well as ways to mitigate the consequences of cyber incidents, were one to occur. This panel will discuss the group’s work and proposed set of Cyber SORA performance criteria.
Open Source: The Only Way to Provide a Trusted Foundation for Assured Autonomy
3:00 PM – 3:45 PM ET
As the world embraces autonomous systems and they become a mainstay in our everyday lives, an important question needs to be answered. Who do we want to determine the behavior of this technology – individual companies, governments or a community? In this presentation, Lorenz will lay out the argument that only open source software provides society with autonomous systems that can be fully trusted, where their behavior is determined and auditable by a community in a fully transparent, democratic approach. Open source software provides a trusted foundation for assured autonomy by providing society with the necessary checks and balances to ensure the behavior is in the best interest of those they’re designed to serve.
Securing Hardware for Autonomous Systems
3:00 PM – 3:45 PM ET
Autonomous systems provide numerous benefits for commercial and government spaces, but rely on complicated hardware, software, sensors, and communication systems to perform their functions. This complexity provides an enticing target for cyber adversaries, as it opens a large attack surface with interesting cyber-physical effects. Securing these systems is often challenging, as they may rely on entrenched standards, protocols, and embedded components that may be impossible or extremely costly to change. Charles River has developed a hardware system that uses machine learning to detect and mitigate cyber attacks in autonomous settings. With no changes to underlying systems and protocols, we are able to monitor data, detect attacks, and take defensive actions. This system has been tested in a lab environment with attacks against controller area networks (CAN), a critical communication system for many modern vehicles. In future work, we expect to use the same system for other networks, such as MIL-STD-1553, as well as sensors and other vehicle systems. This presentation will discuss cyber threats to autonomous systems, focusing on vehicles, and discuss different defensive strategies and techniques, highlighting Charles River’s work in the space.
