Aviation leaders are to travel to Pittsburgh for the first-ever Aviation & Robotics Summit, an invitation-only conference designed to connect them with roboticists.
The summit is a joint effort between Pittsburgh’s Innovation Works, which received $63m in federal funding from the federal Build Back Better programme; the Allegheny County Airport Authority (AACA), which partnered with Future Travel Experience to bring the global aviation industry to Pittsburgh; the Pittsburgh Robotics Network; and the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.
“With Pittsburgh’s world-leading Robotics Row as our backyard, and the very special relationship we have developed with airlines around the globe, Pittsburgh is the most obvious location to hold this summit,” said Christina Cassotis, CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority, which operates Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT). “We hope it can turn into an annual event for automation and aviation.”
“This event encapsulates what we, at the airport, are all about: finding innovative opportunities to build partnerships that move the industry and our community forward,” she added.
Behind the scenes
While the three-day event begins on April 18, ACAA officials have already taken local roboticists on a series of behind-the-scenes tours at PIT to give them a first-hand understanding of the complex systems and organisations that are necessary for the safe, secure, around-the-clock operation of a major airport.
The tours were an eye-opening experience even for those on the cutting edge of technology, according to Mike Schilling, a senior engineer at Carnegie Mellon University and director of hardware engineering for start-up CleanRobotics.
“It was great to see behind closed doors and meet the people that keep the airport operational, through all kinds of changes and weather,” he said. “I work on some pretty cool stuff, but it never fails to amaze me how these systems operate.”
That baseline knowledge will help technologists and researchers like Schilling dive into real-time problem solving with their aviation counterparts.
Similarly, aviation executives who arrive at PIT before the summit will get a close-up look at the airport’s xBridge innovation programme, which serves as a test bed for start-ups and established companies to pilot new technologies in a real-world operating environment. Participants will view demos of successful projects such as algae-powered air filtration, tele-operated vehicles, a robotics- and AI-enabled anaerobic waste digester, revolutionary bio-threat detection solutions, and more.
Participants will spend a morning learning about Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science, robotics, AI and machine learning programmes, followed by tours of Pittsburgh companies, such as Sarcos Robotics. They will then gather in workshop sessions to identify specific problems that aviation and tech can tackle together. Those groups will reconvene the following day to start plotting possible robotics-enabled solutions and the business cases that will support them. That afternoon, teams will present their work to a guest panel of Pittsburgh investors, who will evaluate and provide feedback on the presentations, in particular the potential for commercialising these ideas.
The ideas generated in the workshops are intended to serve as a jumping-off point for potential companies, partnerships and technologies.
Image: Pittsburgh International Airport
