sAfe Urban aiR mObility for euRopeAn citizens.

Project Information

AURORA

Grant agreement ID: 101007134

DOI

10.3030/101007134

Project closed

EC signature date 6 November 2020

Start date 1 December 2020

End date 30 November 2023

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost

€ 5 678 512,50

EU contribution

€ 5 678 512,50

Coordinated by

SEAL AERONAUTICA SL
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AURORA (sAfe Urban aiR mObility for euRopeAn citizens.)

Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2023-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has the potential to overcome challenges like congestion and a lack of surface transport whilst saving infrastructure costs and time. However, making it safe, secure, green, quiet and accepted is challenging due to many factors, such as environment, regulations, and safety-critical technologies. Focusing on emergency-related applications, where UAM brings added value on top of current mobility solutions, the EU-funded AURORA project aimed at connecting development of key missing enabling technologies, stakeholders, and citizens, to foster the adoption of UAM through the co-creation of UAM applications and services. The overall project objective was development of autonomous flight solution for unmaned and and self-piloting passenger-carrying aircraft, integretable into today's and future U-Space and the third parties' ecosystems. such as of those first responders, urgent logistics, and smart-cities.

The AURORA key achievements are materialized around implementation of autonomous flight solution by integrating technological building blocks (robust absolute & relative positioning, path planning, integral detect-and-avoid, and safe landing site detection) and their validation on the planned urgent logistics, first responders, and smart-city use-cases, in simulated and real-world scenarios. The project has generated around 12 exploitable results, including individual technological building blocks of autonomous flight solution, as well as their integration for UAM operations safety-critical applications such as: path planner, noise-aware & energy-aware path planner, integral DAA, and emergency landing solution. These exploitable AURORA results in the form of stand-alone solutions, are almost all transcending into indivudal spin-off projects to increase their maturity for UAM market readiness. Long-term exploitable results of AURORA include the state-of-the art autonomous flight laboratory and high-performance UAV. Both platforms are intended and are already in use beyond the project to support implementation of autonomous flight capabilities in Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), and UAM as its subset, in Europe. Furthermore, activities on UAM acceptance shed a light on the public acceptance of UAM supported by solutions developed in AURORA. Dissemination and exploatation of the AURORA results during the project were concentrated around UAM Stakeholders’’ engagement workshops, organized and conducted in three principal locations of the real-world demonstrations use-cases: Barcelona (Spain), Brno (Czechia), and Pisa (Italy).

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

AURORA embarked on an approach to embrace Urban Air Mobility (UAM) by effectively addressing the challenges and mitigating risks associated with urban flight operations. We did it through the introduction of key enabling technologies, promoting public acceptance of UAM through co-creation with stakeholders and citizens. Hence, some of AURORA's key technological advances and main results are gathered around autonomous flight solutions, as we consider it as one of the key enablers of UAM. In AURORA, we pursued autonomous functionality in the global and local path planning & following solutions, with automated airspace and mission management, including, among others, Global path planning solution (GPP), Local path planning solution (LPP), Mission management solution (MMS), Flight performance management (FPM), Emergency landing solution (ELS) and Overflight Noise Modelling in Urban Areas.

During the project execution, the team also took particular care to involve all relevant stakeholders and integrate their insights into our developments. Furthermore, we joined forces with other H2020 projects in this domain to ensure maximised impact and outreach. Among others, this involved, the development of the decision support system for stakeholders, exploration of the impact of UAM and its reflection on sustainable mobility indicators as well as performing virtual and real-world (Brno, Pisa, Barcelona) demonstrations and knowledge sharing activities. Among others, this involved communication and dissemination activities as First stakeholder workshop (online: September 28th, 2021.), Stakeholder and citizen workshop (“Urban Air Mobility for All”) (Brussels, Belgium: May 17th, 2022.), Brno citizen workshop (Brno, Czech Republic: June 17th, 2022.). Pisa citizen workshop (Pisa, Italy: June 30th, 2023.), Barcelona citizen workshop (Barcelona, Spain: October 30th, 2023.), scientific journal publications, conferences, panels and events participation, shaping of lessons learned and recommendations to UAM stakeholders, that were widely disseminated, among others, also during the AURORA's final event that took place in Luxembourg on 22 November 2023, marking the closing of AURORA.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The first phase of the project focused on state-of-the-art and gap analysis, particularly focusing on regulatory framework, user needs, acceptance, technical and technological advances as well as societal impacts. These insights were used to shape detailed use cases focusing on first responders applications. Following this, the project team developed detailed technical specifications to support synchronised technical advances and developments, bringing forward autonomous flight and emergency landing solutions advances. This, among others, included:
Global path planning solution (GPP) : we developed a 3D flight path planning solution based on a state-of-the-art hybridized A*/Visibility graph method that uses obstacles, terrain, and aircraft performance as constraints. Aircraft performance constraints are factored in as dynamic (flight dynamics wrt density altitude) vertical and horizontal holonomic constraints.
Local path planning solution (LPP): we developed a local path planning solution, also known as detect-and-avoid, based on a state-of-the-art partially observable Markov decision process method. The AURORA solution has effectively adopted an algorithm on which minimum operational performance standards for the Airborne Collision Avoidance System Xu (ACAS Xu) equipment for unmanned aircraft are defined, by integrating ground obstacles in addition to the un-cooperative aerial threats (intruders).
Mission management solution (MMS): we have developed a mission management system based on the robotic operating system (ROS) allowing not only intra-systems on board the aircraft to be interlinked but also geographically distant processes and applications via Internet. In this way we were able to relieve human from flight control responsibility and through the use of MMS put them in an oversight role, with ultimate decision authority over the mission and flight objectives.
Flight performance management (FPM): we have developed a flight performance solution continuous estimation of endurance and range with respect to meteorological conditions (wind speed/direction), density altitude, and energy-storing capacity onboard the UA.
Emergency landing solution (ELS): we have developed a state-of-the-art solution for emergency landing of VTOL aircraft based on continuous safe landing site detection by environment perception sensor, allowing not only spatial suitability to be determined but also occupancy of the site (i.e. human). GPP solution together with SLS detection is allowing to find instantaneous path in an obstacle environment of the city allowing automated safe landing in emergency situations.

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