Winner for NASA’s Next Big AAM Project
NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate recently announced selections for the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) Research and Demonstration for Collaborative Partnership Opportunities. ANRA Technologies is thrilled to be on the winning Ohio Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center of the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) team that will address key safety and integration barriers during National Campaign 2 for Community Planning and Integration activities.
ANRA will be the primary Provider of Services for UAM (PSU) technology for this effort and will serve as the integrator of PSU information sharing across participating aircraft operators (e.g., eVTOL) and future, multiple PSUs. ANRA will lead development and test of PSU integration with vertiport automation services.
“We are honored to be part of the winning ODOT team and look forward to helping NASA advance the entire AAM ecosystem through operational testing and demonstration approach, robust technology research and evaluation activities, and collaboration with community organizations and stakeholders,” said Amit Ganjoo, Founder and CEO for ANRA.
This agreement provides the ODOT team an opportunity to collaborate with NASA on multi-modal transportation planning, modeling and simulations of the AAM portion of a transportation system, public acceptance (including noise issues), community engagement, infrastructure planning, contingency planning for opportunities to demonstrate AAM operations in various scenarios.
NASA states AAM can be characterized by:
(1) novel vehicle configurations that are enabled by electrification of the propulsion system inclusive of all-electric and hybrid-electric propulsion architectures;
(2) levels of vehicle autonomous operations and reduced pilot/operator workload while achieving improved trajectory compliance; and
(3) operations at densities that cannot be managed by current air traffic management system architectures.
ANRA completed NASA AAM NC (X3) simulations in 2020 as a PSU, testing scenarios in a simulated environment. ANRA will continue development to expand its capability to provide services to novel, increasingly autonomous vehicles to reduce workload demand while improving safety at higher operational densities.