Projects
Constraint-Aware Fast Path Planning for UAM in Urban Environments
Project Plan
- Produce a fast path planner for UAM systems operating in dynamic & cluttered environments (e.g., cities);
- Produce constraint-aware adaptive control systems for UAM of poorly modeled properties.
Milestones
- Develop the proposed path planning system for a single vehicle by merging the D*-lite path planner with the PI’s bubble bath method for collision avoidance;
- MRAC law for VTOL UAM
- Code in C++ the proposed system
- Perform hardware-in-the-loop tests & consider a variety of scenarios;
- Perform flight tests.
Testing UAV Based Jammer Localisation using UWB as Surrogate RFI
Radio-frequency interference (RFI) is a growing threat to the national security. RFI include GPS jamming by personal privacy devices (PPDs). PPDs are illegally used by motorists who do not want to be tracked by their employers or by the authorities. PPDs have altered precision localization and coordination at airports, maritime ports, and shipping warehouses [NPNTAB].
We have designed, analyzed, and tested methods to detect and identify PPDs [Jada 2021] [Jada 2022] .We must develop the means to precisely localize and disable PPDs
Terrain-aware flight path generation in ad-hoc airport operations
Mission statement
This project seeks to use commonly available sensors and existing terrain datasets to segment an airport environment and apply human-guided machine learning, or imitation learning, in support of assisted or autonomous landing operations.
System design
3D terrain data is collected via onboard LiDAR while classification of the environment is aided by a visual spectrum camera. We will work in a simulation environment such as Unreal Engine and AirSim for training and testing.
- Use of conventional probabilistic planners can accelerate learning to accounts for population models (person, vehicle movement).
- Expert demonstrations are flown by experienced pilots.
- Typical landing environment would include buildings, roads, powerlines and power poles, persons and vehicles.
Low Noise Vertiport Design and Flight Path Optimization
Objectives of Proposed Project
- Assess low noise vehicle concepts.
- Compare performance of vehicles against proposed annoyance metrics for drone and UAM applications.
- Estimate the annoyance and acoustic impact around vertiports and along vehicle flight paths.
Motivation
- There are many Urban Air Mobility concepts, but a standard vehicle configuration has not emerged.
- The most popular concepts include many closely spaced open rotors.
- Experimental and computational studies have shown that both tonal and broadband noise are important for sUAS and UAM applications, but these vehicle concepts increase the significance of broadband noise in particular - Rizzi et al. (2020).