Future aviation systems, including Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), and next-generation autonomous aircraft, will rely increasingly on AI-driven algorithms for perception, decision-making, and control. While these methods offer unprecedented adaptability and performance, they also introduce significant challenges for certification, safety assurance, and robustness in safety-critical flight operations. Hybrid dynamical systems provide a rigorous framework to model and analyze the interaction between continuous flight dynamics, discrete decision logic, and learning-enabled components. In this talk, we present how hybrid systems methods can be used to endow AI-driven controllers with formal guarantees of stability, safety, and performance, addressing key barriers to their deployment in aviation. We highlight recent results on hybrid control and estimation architectures for safety-critical aerial applications, including provably correct obstacle avoidance strategies for autonomous aerial vehicles operating in cluttered and uncertain environments, and hybrid feedback algorithms for robust and safe landing of eVTOL platforms under sensing and actuation constraints. These approaches leverage synergistic combinations of logic-based decision making and continuous control to overcome topological obstructions, limited sensing, and model uncertainty, challenges that are pervasive in real-world flight scenarios. The presented framework enables the systematic integration of learning-based components, such as reinforcement learning policies, within certifiable hybrid control architectures. This integration provides a pathway toward “assured autonomy,” where advanced AI capabilities can be deployed without compromising the stringent safety and reliability requirements. These developments align with ongoing efforts toward scalable, certifiable autonomy for the future of aviation, supporting NASA’s mission to enable safe, efficient, and resilient air transportation systems.
Ricardo G. Sanfelice is Professor and Department Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California at Santa Cruz. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 2004 and 2007, respectively, from the University of California, Santa Barbara. During 2007 and 2008, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and visited the Centre Automatique et Systemes at the Ecole de Mines de Paris for four months. Prof. Sanfelice is the recipient of the 2013 SIAM Control and Systems Theory Prize, the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Air Force Young Investigator Research Award, the 2010 IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award, the 2012 STAR Higher Education Award for his contributions to STEM education, and the 2020 ACM Test-of-Time Award from the HSCC. He is Associate Editor for Automatica, Communicating Editor for the Journal of Nonlinear Science, Springer, a Fellow of the IEEE, and served as Chair of the Hybrid Systems Technical Committee from the IEEE Control Systems Society. He coauthored articles selected as finalists for the Best Student Paper Award (2014, 2019, and 2022) at the American Control Conference (ACC) and the International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE). He is Director of the Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center at UCSC and Director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) Aviation Initiative. His research interests are in modeling, stability, robust control, observer design, and simulation of nonlinear and hybrid systems with applications to robotics, power systems, aerospace, and biology.
Attendees are invited to join the session in person at NASA Ames Research Center, Building N210, Room 115 (a NASA badge is required) or online:
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About Air Time by NAMS-2
Air Time is a series of seminars on advanced aviation hosted by Crown Innovations, Inc., in collaboration with the University of California’s CITRIS and the Banatao Institute. The seminars feature leading experts on cutting-edge research who share interesting ideas on pertinent topics and innovative methodologies. Air Time speakers include subject matter experts from UC Berkeley, Merced, Davis, and Santa Cruz. The seminars take place weekly.
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