The ATCLP was a semester-long, group project for Stockton’s Software and Security Engineering I course, in collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA’s Human Factors Team – Atlantic City, conducts research to ensure that systems that include human operators and maintainers perform as effectively and safely as possible. They employ advanced virtual reality simulations for air traffic controllers to interact with, however, the commands are interpreted by behind-the-scenes human controllers, who take the ATC commands and manually enter them into the VR system.

The goal of this project was to develop a system able to take a transcripted ATC command and interpret it to return the recipient, instruction type, and parameter. Our team successfully developed the system over a span of three months. At the end of the semester, our ATCLP was implemented with CMU’s open-source Sphinx voice recognition software, along with the FAA’s air traffic simulation system. The resulting system took Voice to Text to a valid ATC command that could be understood by the FAA’s software.