Challenges in Vehicle Safety and Occupant Protection for Autonomous Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) Vehicles

The burgeoning electric Vertical Take-off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicle industry has generated a significant level of enthusiasm amongst aviation designers, manufacturers and researchers. This industry is determined to change the urban transportation paradigm from traditional ground-based vehicles (cars, taxis, buses) to air-based eVTOL vehicles which can be summoned, much like how conventional taxi services work currently. These new eVTOL vehicles are designed to be small and lightweight and operate autonomously without user intervention. There are many unknowns as to how the industry will mature. The logistics of creating a completely new category of vehicle along with its own set of rules are complex, and there are many known - and unknown - barriers to overcome. Some (of many) known barriers include airspace management, ground logistics, physical space, and, the vehicle design itself. There are many eVTOL vehicle manufacturers and organizations working these problems presently. This report will focus on one major barrier: the level of safety as it pertains to the framework of eVTOL vehicles. A high level of safety is necessary for the vehicles to gain acceptance as the public adapts to these autonomous ride-sharing services. An overview of current levels of transportation safety and some extrapolation into how eVTOL vehicles might compare is first presented. Next, a discussion categorizing the major differences between Crash Prevention and Crash Mitigation as it pertains to eVTOL vehicle safety is included with identification of current deficiencies. The report then expands into a framework for specific ideas that could use Crash Mitigation to improve vehicle safety through a crashworthy systems level approach with several designs highlighted. Finally, a brief discussion into the regulatory approach and potential guidelines as they pertain to new eVTOL vehicles is presented. Accordingly, much of the supplemental data will be taken from sources pertaining to either General Aviation (GA) aircraft, rotorcraft, or transport category aircraft, due to the lack of overarching data from eVTOL vehicles. As of this writing, the European Aviation Safety Agency has released a draft version of a VTOL Special Condition, with a comment period closing in late 2018. It is assumed that eventual expected operations and anticipated future regulations for VTOL vehicles will consist of some combination of these (and other) sources

Evaluation of Impact Energy Attenuators and Composite Material Designs of a UAM VTOL Concept Vehicle

The development of Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles for the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) markets presents a need for light weight vehicle structures with effective occupant protection capabilities. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been working to fill that need, recently developing a cadre of concept vehicles to help characterize UAM design feasibility. This paper describes a study, using these concept vehicles, to evaluate the use of advanced composite structure and energy attenuating designs in the UAM vehicle design space. A finite element model (FEM) of a single passenger quadrotor concept vehicle was developed in LS-Dyna and simulated under nominal and off-nominal vertical impact conditions. A variety of energy attenuating design mechanisms were implemented within this model to quantify their effectiveness in improving occupant safety. The use of carbon composites in both the energy attenuation mechanisms and vehicle structure was evaluated. The results of this study found significant reduction in occupant injury risk with the implementation of energy absorbing composite crush tubes and landing gear within the vehicle design. Additionally the use of a carbon fiber as a structural material was found to provide significant weight reduction while maintaining similar occupant loads to that predicted with an aluminum structure. This work provides a preliminary evaluation of design mechanisms and materials that may be used to optimize occupant protection capabilities within the UAM market

Learning Language Representations for Typology Prediction

One central mystery of neural NLP is what neural models "know" about their subject matter. When a neural machine translation system learns to translate from one language to another, does it learn the syntax or semantics of the languages? Can this knowledge be extracted from the system to fill holes in human scientific knowledge? Existing typological databases contain relatively full feature specifications for only a few hundred languages. Exploiting the existence of parallel texts in more than a thousand languages, we build a massive many-to-one neural machine translation (NMT) system from 1017 languages into English, and use this to predict information missing from typological databases. Experiments show that the proposed method is able to infer not only syntactic, but also phonological and phonetic inventory features, and improves over a baseline that has access to information about the languages' geographic and phylogenetic neighbors.Comment: EMNLP 201

The Evaluation of Composite Energy Absorbers for Use in UAM EVTOL Vehicle Impact Attenuation

The demand for new personal air-taxi services is leading to the development of lightweight Vertical Take-off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles with electric propulsion for the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) industry. Manufacturers (OEMs) are considering many different designs to develop a vehicle that is able to take-off, cruise, and land autonomously with seating arrangements ranging between 2 and 15 passengers. It is unclear at present how the eventual market will mature; however, one of the common design characteristics noted by many of the OEMs is the use of advanced materials such as composites. A test and analysis program was initiated at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) in 2018 to evaluate the impact attenuation capabilities of various composite material systems with the goal of eventual implementation into an eVTOL vehicle. A series of 3-inch diameter by 6-inch length tubular specimens were fabricated from different material systems which included both traditional carbon and hybrid woven layers of fibers. Additionally, a subset of specimens were filled with closed-cell polyisocyanurate foam to help both with stabilization and crush response. The ultimate goal of the test program was to design a specimen capable of limiting the sustained crush acceleration to 20 g through a stable crush progression. After a series of material tests, these specimens were evaluated under both static and dynamic conditions for impact energy attenuation characteristics and crush stability. Additionally, a series of simulation models were developed in parallel to the test efforts. It is anticipated that the models developed using the component level test efforts can be used to help guide the development of a design for use in full-scale eVTOL vehicle applications

Full-Scale Crash Test of an MD-500 Helicopter

A full-scale crash test was successfully conducted in March 2010 of an MD-500 helicopter at NASA Langley Research Center s Landing and Impact Research Facility. The reasons for conducting this test were threefold: 1 To generate data to be used with finite element computer modeling efforts, 2 To study the crashworthiness features typically associated with a small representative helicopter, and 3 To compare aircraft response to data collected from a previously conducted MD-500 crash test, which included an externally deployable energy absorbing (DEA) concept. Instrumentation on the airframe included accelerometers on various structural components of the airframe; and strain gages on keel beams, skid gear and portions of the skin. Three Anthropomorphic Test Devices and a specialized Human Surrogate Torso Model were also onboard to collect occupant loads for evaluation with common injury risk criteria. This paper presents background and results from this crash test conducted without the DEA concept. These results showed accelerations of approximately 30 to 50 g on the airframe at various locations, little energy attenuation through the airframe, and moderate to high probability of occupant injury for a variety of injury criteria

Components of Product Lifecycle Management and Their Application within Academia and Product Centric Manufacturing Enterprises

Modern manufacturing companies are utilizing advanced technologies to manage their engineering data to enable them to create products with advanced features faster than ever before. People, culture, product data management (PDM), process management, and project management are combined to achieve synergies within the company. The technological automation of these components is the core of product lifecycle management (PLM). These components are discussed relative to their contribution to a modern PLM vision. Because PLM is a standard method of engineering data management, modern educators must be aware of the methodologies deployed within the modern manufacturing engineering environment to successfully teach engineers

The Future of Cyber-Enabled Influence Operations: Emergent Technologies, Disinformation, and the Destruction of Democracy

Nation-states have been embracing online influence campaigns through disinformation at breakneck speeds. Countries such as China and Russia have completely revamped their military doctrine to information-first platforms [1, 2] (Mattis, Peter. (2018). China’s Three Warfares in Perspective. War on the Rocks. Special Series: Ministry of Truth. https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/chinas-three-warfares-perspective/, Cunningham, C. (2020). A Russian Federation Information Warfare Primer. Then Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Washington University. https://jsis.washington.edu/news/a-russian-federation-information-war fare-primer/.) to compete with the United States and the West. The Chinese principle of “Three Warfares” and Russian Hybrid Warfare have been used and tested across the spectrum of operations ranging from competition to active conflict. With the COVID19 pandemic limiting most means of face-to-face interpersonal communi-cation, many other nations have transitioned to online tools to influence audiences both domestically and abroad [3] (Strick, B. (2020). COVID-19 Disinformation: Attempted Influence in Disguise. Australian Strategic Policy Institute. International Cyber Policy Center. https://www.aspi.org.au/report/covid-19-disinformation.) to create favorable environments for their geopolitical goals and national objectives. This chapter focuses on the landscape that allows nations like China and Russia to attack democratic institutions and discourse within the United States, the strategies and tactics employed in these campaigns, and the emergent technologies that will enable these nations to gain an advantage with key populations within their spheres of influence or to create a disadvantage to their competitors within their spheres of influence. Advancements in machine learning through generative adversarial networks [4] (Creswell, A; White, T; Dumoulin, V; Arulkumaran, K; Sengupta, B; Bharath, A. (2017) Generative Adversarial Networks: An Overview. IEE-SPM. April 2017. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.07035.pdf.) that create deepfakes [5] (Whit-taker, L; Letheren, K; Mulcahy, R. (2021). The Rise of Deepfakes: A Conceptual J. Littell envelope symbolenvelope symbolenvelope symbol Army Cyber Institute at the West Point, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY 10996, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A.Farhadietal. (eds.), The Great Power Competition Volume 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04586-8_10 197 198 J. Littell Framework and Research Agenda for Marketing. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ abs/10.1177/1839334921999479.) and attention-based transformers [6](https:// arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805.) (Devlin et al., 2018) that create realistic speech patterns and interaction will continue to plague online discussion and information spread, attempting to cause further partisan divisions and decline of U.S. stature on the world stage and democracy as a whole.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/aci_books/1020/thumbnail.jp

Why More Is Required to Address Maine’s Childhood Lead-Poisoning Problem

Although largely hidden from the public eye, childhood lead poisoning has been identified as one of Maine’s leading environmental health problems. Recent data show not only that lead-poisoning levels are unacceptably high among Maine’s children, but also that screening rates are lower than recommended by national health organizations and lower than in other New England states. David Littell discusses why childhood lead poisoning is such a problem in Maine and what can be done to remedy the situation, providing a thorough examination of how children are exposed to lead and the magnitude of the problem. He reviews the state’s existing program, and contrasts Maine’s approach with that of several other states. Littell concludes with a series of thoughtful recommendations and argues that the state must do much more if it intends to achieve its policy goal of ending childhood lead poisoning by 2010