Autonomous Vehicles for Flight Line Use

Abstract

The purpose of this proof-of-concept study is to discover if autonomous vehicles (AV) can work on and within the United States Air Force (USAF) flight line infrastructure to free flight line personnel for value-added roles. An autonomous vehicle was deployed to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst (JB-MDL), NJ, to document the limitations and uses and sought to answer; can an autonomous vehicle work on the flight line? The study revealed that an AV could operate on the flight line safely, in a useful and effective manner, and provide some labor-hour cost-savings benefits when applied in foreign object and debris (FOD) collection tasks. The study results were an extensive development of the problem set required to fully employ autonomous vehicles in flight line or aerial port environments. A 'lighthouse' testbed should be established at JB-MDL because of the cross-service environment and access to the Air Mobility Command's (AMC) Expeditionary Center (EC).

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2021
Accession Number
AD1144053

Entities

People

  • Joshua P. Sollee

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Cyber
  • Human Systems
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Aircraft Maintenance
  • Application Software
  • Autonomous Vehicles
  • Civilian Personnel
  • Commerce
  • Emerging Technology
  • Information Systems
  • Infrastructure
  • Law
  • Maintenance
  • Materials
  • Organizational Structure
  • Social Sciences
  • Spreadsheet Software
  • United States
  • Vehicles

Readers

  • Aerospace Engineering
  • Aerospace logistics and air mobility.
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy