Projects

NSF CCRI: 2235157, 223518, 2235159, 22351160
NSF CRI: 1730675, 1730589, 1730570, 1730325

---

Collaborative Research: Research Infrastructure: CCRI: ENS: Enhanced Open Networked Airborne Computing Platform

NSF CCRI: 2235157, 2235158, 2235159, 2235160

Abstract: The project aims to develop an enhanced open networked airborne computing platform to facilitate the design, implementation, and testing of an airborne computing platform that seamlessly integrates control, computing, communication, and networking. The project will provide community support based on the flywheel model, and to attract and engage community users through organized support from four regional sites in the nation, hands-on workshops, testbed access, and technical user services.

The intellectual merit lies in a new set of enhancements to facilitate more advanced research and applications of airborne computing. Specifically, the proposed infrastructure is enhanced in four major areas. First, hardware/middle-ware update to facilitate distributed control, which includes phased array antennas, next generation of mobile system, and Robot Operating System (ROS) 2. Second, enhancement of communication and networking, which include software-defined radio (SDR), long-term evolution (LTE), and software-defined networking (SDN). Third, enhancement of airborne computing services, which include the target recognition and tracking service, mobile edge computing (MEC) service, and airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data processing service. Last, the incorporation of security features, which include the development of a secure and privacy-preserving federated learning platform and integration of security packages to fulfill essential and advanced security requirements, such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and secure computation.

This collaborative project brings together investigators from the University of North Texas (UNT), the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), San Diego State University (SDSU), and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM). All four participating universities are minority-serving (UPRM) or Hispanic-serving (UTA, UNT, and SDSU) institutions with a large number of underrepresented minority students. The project will reach out to local communities through K-12 activities, and also pursue broad dissemination through organizing student design competitions, tutorials, and workshops, participating in national demonstration efforts, and engaging domain professionals. The proposed education and outreach activities will produce a profound impact on broad communities and benefit a large number of underrepresented minority students. The proposed project on enhanced open networked airborne computing platform will address the design and evaluation needs of many researchers in the CISE community and benefit a wide range of applications in the emergency, energy, environment, and transportation sectors.

The project website https://utari.uta.edu/research/airborne/ will be the portal to access detailed design documents, hardware and software tools, tutorial, datasets, training materials, conferences and workshops, and other project-related materials to extend the research capabilities of the broader community during and beyond the project span.

This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

CI-New: Collaborative Research: Developing an Open Networked Airborne Computing Platform

NSF CRI: 1730675, 1730589, 1730570, 1730325

Abstract: Networked airborne computing is a novel computing paradigm that can benefit many important civilian applications, including intelligent transportation, emergency response, infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, etc. Networked airborne computing also opens up many new fundamental research opportunities. Despite its importance, existing infrastructures for Unmanned Airborne Systems (UAS) research cannot serve the research needs because they are often designed specifically for a single purpose and/or oriented to missions that involve a single aircraft. Therefore, an open networked airborne computing infrastructure is critically needed to enable the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) communities and beyond to participate in new research and development in this burgeoning field. This project is expected to produce broad impact related to cooperative multi-UAS applications in emergency, energy, environment, and transportation sectors. This project also provides Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics learning opportunities, and expands underrepresented minority participation. Three of the participating universities are minority-serving and/or Hispanic serving institutions with a large number of underrepresented minority students.

The objective of this project is to develop a new community infrastructure to enable advanced research on networked airborne computing systems. Specifically, the proposed community infrastructure will provide hardware/software designs and development tools, workshop and training opportunities, and field-test support in a Federal Aviation Administration-designated test site. The proposed airborne computing platform is innovative in that it includes a UAS-mounted generic and interactive computing system, a broadband wireless communication system, a UAS/antenna cooperative control system, and up-to-down application development capabilities to support a full-scale development. Both hardware and software are open-sourced and designed in modules with virtualization support so that CISE researchers can easily enhance or replace modules and instantiate additional virtualized functions to facilitate various research and development activities for networked airborne computing applications and services. The modular design, flexibility and extensibility for new development allow researchers to easily isolate and develop specific components of their own research focus while relying on the basic functionality of other components, thus saving significant cost and time for learning and development. The project opens up opportunities for CISE researchers to quickly develop and test solutions that address many new fundamental challenges in networked airborne computing, and to significantly advance cross-cutting research and development in computing, communication, control, and aerospace.