Lighter-Than-Air Hybrid Electric Orb for Urban Air Mobility

Galaxy Unmanned Systems LLC and our academic and industry partners (“Team Galaxy”) are proud to present our Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) Hybrid Electric Orb for Urban Air Mobility.  Autonomous aerial mobility has huge potential while also arriving with a host of airspace and ground-based infrastructure issues.  Such challenges include iterative innovation cycles based on systems that can be scaled and deployed cheaply and reliably during early development in an actual operational environment.  That is, as the enabling algorithms, technologies, and infrastructure are developed, it is essential that robotic systems are tested and validated in the real world so that environmental factors are addressed from the beginning.  Ref. [1] states, “…in order to actually develop an autonomous system…to survive and successfully perform missions, [they] must be able to sense, perceive, detect, identify, classify, plan, decide, and respond to a diverse set of threats in complex and uncertain environments.”  In the Air Force (AF) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Ref. [2] the Phase I feasibility study is meant to define a clear plan for the technology to demonstrate value while mitigating risk to potential DAF customers.  Our proposed adaptation of our commercial solution into a hybrid electric orb will provide a bridging capability to address and accelerate innovation and enable complex systems development in the real-world using an inherently risk-mitigating platform.  To this end, our LTA hybrid electric Orb concept provides a solid foundational approach to solving these challenges, as it is widely recognized that airships are the safest, most reliable vehicles for enabling transformational changes in aviation, see Ref. [3]. By simulating then conducting and validating actual flight studies with the LTA hybrid electric orb concept, a universally applicable set of algorithms and deployment doctrines can be developed that are translatable to other robotics platforms and across numerous government and private sector industries.  In other words, the LTA hybrid electric orb is a valid solution in its own right, while being a steppingstone for the underlying AI/ML processes to be utilized in other distributed/integrated robotics systems of all flavors/complexity/configuration. Orbs are set to be the new technological “wheel’ for everyday life.  We are not reinventing this wheel, but rather providing the risk mitigating platform needed to integrate it into the market.