With 11 National Research Council (NRC) of Canada investigators - plus government, industry and academic collaborators - Derek "Duff" Gowanlock takes a crawl-walk-run approach to autonomous flight (see "Supervised Autonomy, Step-by-Step," Vertiflite, Nov/Dec 2021). In March, the NRC Bell 412 advanced systems research aircraft at Ottawa's Flight Research Laboratory flew departure, enroute and approach profiles hands-off and chose a ramp spot among other helicopters for a landing guided by light detection and ranging (lidar). "It was actually a pretty significant milestone for us," said Gowanlock. To our knowledge, it's the first complete supervised autonomy flight on a transport-category helicopter in Canada, ever."The technical leader for the Canadian Vertical Lift Autonomy Demonstration continued, "There's so much complexity around autonomy, around employment responsibilities, safety and airworthiness considerations, human-machine teaming,manned-unmanned teaming. We now have a foothold, a baseline capability that can support not only the Royal Canadian Air Force [RCAF] and Defence Research and Development Canada [DRDC], who's our biggest collaborator, but also Canadian industry." He added, "It's not many organizations that can put together a modular, full autonomous flight capability that can then be used to plug in different sensors or algorithms."
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