Impact and Influence of Cyber-Physical Systems Research on Autonomous Aerospace Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems, as a discipline, is relatively new, appearing prominently between 2000-2010, but has rapidly made contributions in many disciplines. The aerospace industry has been a primary application domain for CPS from the beginning, with much focus on autonomous systems, particularly Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Aerospace systems provide an opportune, complex, safety-critical system on which to prove out CPS research, techniques, and strategies where robustness, agility, and provable performance guarantees are important. In this paper we survey and discuss the synthesis of core CPS research areas into four key areas of autonomous aerospace systems. We illuminate how these have been applied across aviation and space systems that interface with human operators and/or bystanders. We also discuss how computing and select CPS concepts more prominently applied in other applications could be applied in aerospace systems. Finally, we elaborate on existing shortcomings in cyber-physical aerospace systems and propose future avenues of exploration and application to pursue.