AE Seminar by Dr Sri Prakash Sarathy, Northrop Grumman

AI in general and Agentic AI Frameworks in particular have begun to appear in safety critical and mission critical application of autonomous systems. Assurance of their behavior lags behind in terms of principles, tools and engineering practice. In this presentation I will cover some emerging approaches that are both powerful and practical, and easily understood and implemented by average engineering graduate. This is extremely important since assuring systems with AI requires a holistic approach starting from the systems design engineering all the way to implementation, deployment and maintenance. I present some of the more advanced research methods applicable to autonomous aircraft systems.

Speaker: Dr. Prakash Sarathy

Biography :

Dr. Prakash Sarathy is the Chief Engineer in the areas of advanced autonomy, cyber assurance, and systems engineering, within the Research and Development division of NGAS. He has over 30 years of experience in various aspects of aerospace engineering, providing technical and project/program management and oversight for advanced technology programs requiring accelerated risk burn down and rapid maturation. His technical expertise includes software for autonomous systems, behavior assurance for safety and security of advanced vehicle configurations, integration of hardware and software components in complex multi-physics application domains. This software engineering expertise coupled with his in-depth experience in linear and nonlinear dynamics of vehicle systems, applied to guidance, navigation and control of aircraft, spacecraft and robots as well as of real-time and embedded simulations, high fidelity modeling, implementation, VV&A and testing, provide an excellent framework for the challenges of next generation autonomous aircraft systems and their assurance. He has provided technical and project/program management and oversight for advanced technology programs ( RTCF, DARPA/OFW and USN/N-UCAS) requiring accelerated risk burn down and rapid maturation. He is experienced in many facets of hardware, software and systems engineering process and practice as applied to R&D as well as production software across many application verticals. Expertise in SCM, SQA,  agile development,  re-engineering and testing. He has deep expertise in linear and nonlinear dynamics of vehicle systems, including flexible multi-vehicle interactions with particular emphasis to real-time simulation of vehicles., as well as guidance, navigation and control of aircraft, spacecraft and robots, including flight mechanics, handling qualities and aero-elasticity. He has spearheaded flight software safety in mixed critical domains under the AFRL MCAR program, and  overseen software development under the DARPA/OFW (X-plane), DARPA/HURT and USN/UCAS-D programs.