Long Term Autonomy for Aerial Urban Mobility

Near Earth Autonomy proposes to extend the NASA SBIR Phase Inbsp;to develop the key technologies that enable urban air mobility (UAM) and its applications: delivery of goods, personal transportation, emergency/disaster response, etc. This work will contribute to advance NASArsquo;s Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) program, which focuses on ldquo;enabling emerging aviation markets that will provide substantial benefit to the U.S. public and industry.rdquo; In addition to serving the needs of thenbsp;UAM market, our proposal builds fundamental technologies that can be used to address the needs of Simplified Vehicle Operation (SVO) asnbsp;identified by the AAM program. By enabling intuitive safe operation, SVO can bridge the gap between the high skill level needed to operate fully manual aircraftnbsp;and fully autonomous aircraft that have a long certification process to be operational.Successful integration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the national airspace system (NAS), especially in urban environments, will require technologies that enable UAS to fly safely and are able to manage contingencies without resorting to remote pilots to guide them. This work will address three primary challenges related to this topic: (1) nbsp;GPS-denied navigation must deal with complex, dynamic environments, (2) safe landing requires consideration of dynamic objects on the ground, and (3) critical component failure during flight requiring a rapid response for the aircraft to land safely.In Phase I we demonstrated the feasibility of the baseline technologies in a series of flight tests using a small unmanned aircraft and a full-size helicopter, including GPS-free aircraft localization over an 11-km flight over urban terrain. In Phase II we will further develop and mature the technologies and demonstrate them in flight on a self-contained sensing and computing payload. In Phase II we will also pursue various commercialization channels based on our existing relationships with aerospace and avionics manufacturers.