announced that it has won NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate National Campaign 2 for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) for Community Planning and Integration activities to address key safety and integration barriers together with FlyOhio, a collaboration of public, private and academic institutions led by DriveOhio’s advanced air mobility (AAM) group.
ANRA will be the primary Provider of Services for UAM (PSU) technology for this multi-year program and will serve as the integrator of PSU information sharing across participating aircraft operators (e.g., eVTOL) and future, multiple PSUs. ANRA will lead the development and test of PSU integration with vertiport automation services.
“We are honoured to be part of the winning FlyOhio 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 FlyOhio 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.
“Advanced Air Mobility technology is revolutionizing the transportation industry and Ohio is well-positioned to lead market adoption as these solutions scale. At DriveOhio, we are committed to developing and deploying connected, automated, shared, and electric vehicles and infrastructure on the ground and in the air. This program is a manifestation of that ethos, and we are excited to increase the advanced aviation investment in Ohio’s economy,”
said Howard Wood, executive director at DriveOhio.
NASA states AAM can be characterized by: (1) novel vehicle configurations that are enabled by the 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.
Source: Press Release