Group II Demonstration of Robotic Landing Gear for Emerging eVTOL Systems

Commercial eVTOL aircraft are emerging for use in urban environments that assume well prepared landing sites and extensive backup power systems that ensure soft landings. Such designs do not consider defense-specific missions where landing terrains may be mobile or unprepared. Additionally, they do not consider emergency scenarios where hard impact landings may be inevitable. In order for these aircraft to successfully transition to USAF missions, they will need to land on unprepared surfaces and even mobile platforms, such as ship decks, and offer hard impact attenuation. Earthly Dynamics and Research Institute Georgia Tech propose studied Robotic Landing Gear for Group 4 eVTOL platforms that will meet the future needs of the USAF. During the customer discovery, Earthly Dynamics discovered that AFSOC had a defense mission need for RLG on ISR VTOL UAS in Groups 2-5. Together, AFSOC and Earthly Dynamics defined a Phase II solution trial to design, build, and flight test a Robotic Landing Gear design that is feasible for Group 4 onto a Group 2 UAS. Earthly Dynamics proposes to completely design the system using in-house and commercial digital engineering tools, then complete indoor validation tests of the system, and conclude the solution trial with a flight demonstration. This Phase II will see the TRL level for the Group 4 RLG mechanisms advance from TRL 3/4 to TRL 7 on Group 2 UAS. The proposed Phase II effort will be the first step to transitioning Robotic Landing Gear from Academia to a Commercial solution as EDC scales the systems from Group 2 UAS to large manned and unmanned aircraft – such as eVTOL platforms.