Robust and Resilient Autonomy for Advanced Air Mobility (AVIATE)

The long-term goal of this project is to develop a Robust and Resilient Autonomy framework with principled and verifiable architectures to deal with uncertainties and off-nominal situations to enable safe and efficient Advanced Air Mobility.

The proposed framework comprises a holistically-integrated perception, planning, and control pipeline, equipped with learning-enabled components and principled ways for uncertainty propagation and competence quantification. It also includes fast code-level verification tools tightly integrated into the development of the autonomy stack. For automated in-flight contingency management, the research will advance state-of-the-art fault detection and reachability analysis for mission replanning. Advanced algorithms and tools for resource allocation and sequential decision-making problems will also be developed to improve the efficiency and safety assurance of Advanced Air Mobility systems at both individual-vehicle and airspace levels.

During this integrated effort, a number of module-level and subsystem spinoff technologies will also be developed:

• software for implementing robust perception, planning, and control algorithms with learning-enabled components with assured safety and performance;
• fast code-level verification tools for autonomous systems with learning-enabled control and uncertain dynamics;
• software for implementing learning-enabled algorithms for fast diagnosis of both discrete-event and continuous-valued faults, and methods for fast reachability analysis;
• tools and simulation environments (e.g., the photo-realistic environment) for testing Advanced Air Mobility vehicles and cloud/web-designed tool for managing Advanced Air Mobility vehicles at the network level.

Through the research, the TRL of developed technologies will be expected to rise from 3 to 6.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 3) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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