Intelligent Autonomy for Aerospace Engineering Systems

The technological innovation on CNS and GNC in aviation and aeronautics creates the need not only for advanced automation but also more autonomy, and even intelligence to develop innovative aerospace engineering systems. This paper presents a varied summary of approaches for intelligent automation and autonomy from diverse operation and application domains. It deals with proposals from different computing and engineering disciplines as potential candidates to enable smart self-governance in next generations of air transport systems. The summary includes an important range of system integration architectures for Intelligent Autonomy (IA). They are relevant for CNS and GNC applications. The technologies discussed are meant to inspire architectures for intelligent and autonomous aerospace systems. The discussion focusses on biologically-inspired architectures as an attempt to provide human-like infrastructures for engineering systems that perform people's tasks. It explores challenges and opportunities as well as advantages and disadvantages for aerospace to develop CNS and GNC systems inspired by such architectures. Concluding remarks and the way forward to foster realization of IA solutions from varied domains for aerospace engineering are also presented.