The College of Engineering, Knowlton School of Architecture and Tau Beta Pi partnered to hold the 11th Annual Undergraduate Research Forum for Engineering and Architecture students this April.
Following the measures taken by the university to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, the Undergraduate Research Forum on April 2, 2020 was cancelled, however, virtual presentations were accepted to be judged and receive awards.
Two Undergraduate Researchers in the Cognitive System Engineering Lab, Margaret Miles and Jonathan Dowling, participated in this event through a virutal walkthrough of their work under Dr. Martijn IJtsma. Their research, titled “Work Domain Analysis to Develop Scenarios for Resilient Unmanned Air Traffic Operations”, focused on the lab’s current work to integrate unmanned air vehicles safely and efficiently in Ohio’s airspace. Although in the early stages of the research, important progress was already made toward implementing important cognitive systems engineering principles prior to the development of a new air traffic management system. The ultimate goal of the project for the state of Ohio is to develop a new visual monitoring system integrated with unmanned aerial vehicles, current air traffic management, ground based detect and avoid systems, and weather.
The main point of the research was development of an abstraction hierarchy describing the system’s goals, functions, and physical form. Their abstract stated, “Using this system description, we will identify human performance issues, and develop scenarios and edge cases that challenge the system’s resilience. Accounting for the brittleness of the system in the edge cases is one of the pillars of resilience engineering, and allows the system to be robust in the phase of varying and uncertain demands. Findings from our abstraction hierarchy, scenarios and edge cases will ultimately support the development of an accurate simulation of the introduction of unmanned vehicles into airspace, and support our efforts to create a safe and efficient UTM system.”
This was the first research forum which these students were a part of and the first under the work of Dr. Martijn IJtsma. Their poster can be found below.
