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ANSYS Will Help Airbus Develop AI-Enabled Flight Controls for the FCAS Program’s Autonomous Wingmen

SAE International’s Pittsburgh-area neighbor, ANSYS, will be contributing to Europe’s next generation air-superiority architecture.

(Image courtesy: Airbus Defence and Space)

Airbus Defence and Space , a division of Airbus SE , is partnering with Pittsburgh-based ANSYS, Inc.  to develop software for advanced unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as part of France and Germany’s Future Combat Air System  (FCAS) program. The collaboration is geared towards enabling safety-critical flight controls with sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) for the program’s rollout in 2030.

Originally proposed at the 2018 Internationale Luft- und Raumfahrtausstellung (ILA) Berlin Air Show , the systems-of-systems FCAS architecture includes new sixth-generation Next Generation Fighter (NGF) that will serve as a hub or nucleus for multiple cloud-linked UAV or “remote carrier” wingmen.

While Airbus has been investing in manned-unmanned teaming (MUT) research and development and successfully validated its MUT capabilities, developing these platforms creates a huge engineering challenge as advanced, safety-critical, AI-driven flight control software will be required to perform highly sophisticated decision making with unprecedented speed and accuracy. ANSYS will add an embedded layer of software control for the remote carrier wingmen aircraft.

William Kucinski  is content editor at SAE International, Aerospace Products Group in Warrendale, Pa. Previously, he worked as a writer at the NASA Safety Center in Cleveland, Ohio and was responsible for writing the agency’s System Failure Case Studies. His interests include literally anything that has to do with space, past and present military aircraft, and propulsion technology.

Contact him regarding any article or collaboration ideas by e-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Topics:
Aircraft Aircraft Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) Automotive Aviation Avionics Avionics Big data Cloud computing Command, Control, and Navigation Systems Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Connectivity Data Acquisition Data acquisition and handling Data exchange Defense Electronics Flight control actuators Flight control systems Fly-by-wire control systems MEMs Machine learning Military aircraft Neural networks Pistons Real-time data Remote sensing Sensors Simulation Software Simulation and modeling Unmanned Air Vehicles/Systems (UAV/UAS) Unmanned aerial vehicles Vehicles

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