Cockpit Associate

The first prototype of the Cockpit Associate (CA) was built for the NASA Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) Program (2003-2005) and provided important notifications, recommendations, and advisories to a general aviation pilot. The goals of the CA were to reduce errors, reduce accidents, improve safety, and improve single pilot performance. The CA continually performed situation assessment, conflict detection, and alerting as the world changed in the general aviation airspace. This automated negotiation technology was built on top of a software engine built by Applied Systems Intelligence, Inc. to provide the means to rapidly develop and deploy intelligent agents working alongside a pilot and air traffic controllers to improve performance and reduce workload.

The principal rationale for cockpit automation, such as the Cockpit Associate, has been the assumption that workload is reduced which achieves three objectives:
 

Relieve pilots of routine manual controlling and mental computation in an emergency.

Allow pilots to spend less time with "heads in the cockpit" especially at lower altitudes to scan for other aircraft and allow the number of crew members to be reduced to one under abnormal circumstances.

Prove automated negotiation and models of intent driven behaviors can support the NSA.

ASI's role in SATS was the development of a Cockpit Associate, an intelligent copilot-in-a-box, to improve the Single Pilot Performance (SPP) and facilitate High Volume Operations in the SATS environment. The CA system, built on ASI's PreAct® software, enables aircraft pilots to conduct safer and more efficient operations in the complex airspace of the evolving National Air Space (NAS). It is designed to infer the informational needs of the pilot based on the current flight activities and airspace environment and then to make relevant recommendations to the pilot at the appropriate time. In concept, the workload and stress for the pilot will be reduced, resulting in better flight decisions and safer operations in an automated negotiation environment.