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Completed TRL 4 (started at 2, targeting 4)
The air transportation system is on the verge of drastic change. Enabled by technological advances in areas including electric propulsion, computational capabilities, and machine learning, emerging vehicles have the potential to drastically lower transportation costs. Vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capabilities are expanding operational flexibility, and will allow vehicles to takeoff and land in nearly any area, including dense urban areas. With autonomous and highly augmented operations on the rise, the industry envisions near-future Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) Operations including both high-density Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and rural area operations. These AAM operations will provide rapid “air-taxi”, cargo, and emergency services. Future vehicles and operations will give rise to a wide variety of new safety issues, as well as require new approaches to address long-standing issues that have previously been handled by well-trained human pilots. Among the most important is the ability to autonomously confirm the suitability of a planned landing area prior to landing. The proposed autonomous Landing Area Confirmation Scan (AutoLACS) emulates the perception, cognition, and decision making of expert operators to provide an autonomous onboard capability to confirm the suitability of an intended landing area (runway, helipad, vertiport, off-field, etc.) in support of safe integration of UAS and AAM/UAM into the National Airspace System (NAS). The AutoLACS tool provides a low-cost and low-SWaP approach to identifying hazards on an intended landing surface. The key AutoLACS innovation is the use of low-cost and low-SWaP digital camera imagery (topographic photogrammetry), together with publicly available LiDAR data, to rapidly confirm the suitability of an intended landing area and to use this information to inform a multi-objective go-around/rejected-landing decision.
The AutoLACS tool directly addresses the interests of NASA’s UAM Vision ConOps including enabling full responsibility for the “detection of tactical hazards” and equipping aircraft to be “highly automated and capable of performing most operations with minimal human interaction." AutoLACS addresses the ARMD strategic implementation plan's Strategic Thrust 6 (Assured Autonomy) that points to a need for safe implementation of autonomy in aviation applications. AutoLACS naturally fits into the NASA Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign.
The proposed research has a high-transition potential to other government agencies and commercial users. Among commercial users, the target market is the AAM vehicle designers and operators who require a compact off-the-shelf autonomous landing site conformation system that can be easily customized to vehicle-specific performance parameters.
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