Automating Operator Oversight in an Autonomous, Regulated, Safety-Critical Research Facility

The deployment at scale of Unmanned Aerial Systems have become increasingly imminent in the last few years, even as concerns regarding the dependability and predictability of their command and control channels remain fully to be addressed. The intersection of ground-to-air wireless communications, aerial networking, and trajectory control has become a research area of sharp interest. The validation of such research, beyond the theoretical/simulation stage, requires a facility that is both realistic, and admits of potentially risky or unsafe operation, while in the end guaranteeing personnel and equipment safety. The AERPAW project is an ambitious project, funded by the PAWR program of the US NSF, to create a remote accessible research platform for a research facility to enable such validation. To enable remote usage of such a testbed, yet provide the researcher with complete experimental freedom, the AERPAW facility includes a combination of architectural mechanisms that balance freedom of experimentation with regulatory compliance and safety. In this paper, we articulate the challenges and considerations of designing such mechanisms, and present the architectural features of AERPAW that attempt to realize these lofty goals.