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Active TRL 2 (started at 2, targeting 5)
This project focuses on advancing the safety and resilience of next-generation advanced air mobility systems through the development of intelligent autonomy and adaptive control technologies. The research aims to enable real-time detection, self-assessment, and response to abnormal conditions, allowing autonomous systems to adjust their behavior dynamically while maintaining safety under operational constraints. These capabilities will support intelligent decision-making and resilient control in complex aviation environments, ensuring safe and reliable operations even in the presence of unexpected events or disturbances.
This project addresses long-standing technical barriers that have limited and delayed broader advanced air mobility integration into the national airspace system. To that end, we are building a multi-functional safety assurance architecture with self-learning attributes to enable dependable supervision, health-aware management, and resilient control. The framework generates safety-related specifications that drive optimized safe trajectory planning and bounded learning-based control actions under learned operational constraints. In parallel, cognitive mechanisms are developed to continuously monitor the effectiveness and trustworthiness of the intelligent components within the overall safety assurance system.
This project aims to enable the design of advanced missions with high survivability and optimized performance across a wide range of flight conditions. Successful completion of this project is expected to make a significant contribution to the state of the art in autonomous flight, vehicle health monitoring and management, and intelligent guidance, optimization, and control. In particular, it will help accelerate the integration of advanced air mobility systems into the national airspace system by directly addressing safety concerns and supporting greater public trust and acceptance of autonomous operations.
Beyond the technical contributions, the project also places strong emphasis on education and workforce development. It provides research opportunities and mentoring for students and supports the development of new materials and tools to help prepare the next generation of aerospace professionals.
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This is early/mid-stage (TRL 2) — 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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