Collaborative Research: Research Infrastructure: CCRI: ENS: Enhanced Open Networked Airborne Computing Platform

The project aims to develop an enhanced open networked airborne computing platform to facilitate the design, implementation, and testing of an airborne computing platform that seamlessly integrates control, computing, communication, and networking. The project will provide community support based on the flywheel model, and to attract and engage community users through organized support from four regional sites in the nation, hands-on workshops, testbed access, and technical user services. The intellectual merit lies in a new set of enhancements to facilitate more advanced research and applications of airborne computing. Specifically, the proposed infrastructure is enhanced in four major areas. First, hardware/middle-ware update to facilitate distributed control, which includes phased array antennas, next generation of mobile system, and Robot Operating System (ROS) 2. Second, enhancement of communication and networking, which include software-defined radio (SDR), long-term evolution (LTE), and software-defined networking (SDN). Third, enhancement of airborne computing services, which include the target recognition and tracking service, mobile edge computing (MEC) service, and airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data processing service. Last, the incorporation of security features, which include the development of a secure and privacy-preserving federated learning platform and integration of security packages to fulfill essential and advanced security requirements, such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and secure computation. This collaborative project brings together investigators from the University of North Texas (UNT), the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), San Diego State University (SDSU), and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM). All four participating universities are minority-serving (UPRM) or Hispanic-serving (UTA, UNT, and SDSU) institutions with a large number of underrepresented minority students. The project will reach out to local communities through K-12 activities, and also pursue broad dissemination through organizing student design competitions, tutorials, and workshops, participating in national demonstration efforts, and engaging domain professionals. The proposed education and outreach activities will produce a profound impact on broad communities and benefit a large number of underrepresented minority students. The proposed project on enhanced open networked airborne computing platform will address the design and evaluation needs of many researchers in the CISE community and benefit a wide range of applications in the emergency, energy, environment, and transportation sectors. The project website https://utari.uta.edu/research/airborne/ will be the portal to access detailed design documents, hardware and software tools, tutorial, datasets, training materials, conferences and workshops, and other project-related materials to extend the research capabilities of the broader community during and beyond the project span. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.