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The term Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) refers to a new mode of transportation utilizing highly automated airborne vehicles for transporting goods and/or people. The adoption of widespread use of AAM vehicles will necessitate a network of vertiports located throughout a geographical region. A vertiport refers to a physical structure for the departure, arrival, and parking/storage of AAM vehicles. NASA-developed Vertiport Assessment and Mobility Operations System (VAMOS!) enables identifying geographical locations suitable for locating a vertiport or assessing suitability of pre-selected locations. For example, suitability evaluation factors include zoning, land use, transit stations, fire stations, noise, and time-varying factors like congestion and demand. The vertiport assessment system assigns suitability values to these factors based on user-input, and types, including location-based (e.g., proximity to mass transit stations), level-based (e.g., noise levels), characteristic-based (e.g., residential zoning), and time-based (e.g., demand). Based on user input, the system spreads a grid over the geographical area, specifies importance criteria and weights for scaling the impact of the suitability factors, and identifies specific sub-regions as candidate locations. The candidate sub-regions are shown on a user interface map overlay in a color-coded gradient that reflects the suitability strength for a sub-region. Vertiport locations are selected within these sub-regions. These candidate vertiport locations are refined by establishing feasibility of flight between them. VAMOS! includes a modeling component and a simulation component. The modeling component assists a user to identify one or more geographical locations at which a vertiport may be physically built. The simulation component of the technology displays, in real-time, the simulated operational behavior of AAM vehicles and in the context of their projected flight paths combined with data dynamically obtained from live sources. These data sources can be from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) or other private or public governing bodies, from one or more AAM vehicles in flight, and from weather sources.

The NASA receiver is specifically designed for use in coherent LiDAR systems that leverage high-energy (i.e., > 1mJ) fiber laser transmitters. Within the receiver, an outgoing laser pulse from the high-energy laser transmitter is precisely manipulated using robust dielectric and coated optics including mirrors, waveplates, a beamsplitter, and a beam expander. These components appropriately condition and direct the high-energy light out of the instrument to the atmosphere for measurement. Lower energy atmospheric backscatter that returns to the system is captured, manipulated, and directed using several of the previously noted high-energy compatible bulk optics. The beam splitter redirects the return signal to mirrors and a waveplate ahead of a mode-matching component that couples the signal to a fiber optic cable that is routed to a 50/50 coupler photodetector. The receiver’s hybrid optic design capitalizes on the advantages of both high-energy bulk optics and fiber optics, resulting in order-of-magnitude enhancement in performance, enhanced functionality, and increased flexibility that make it ideal for long-distance or low-backscatter LiDAR applications. The related patent is now available to license. Please note that NASA does not manufacturer products itself for commercial sale.

The Active Turbulence Suppression (ATS) system for electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles employ existing lifting propellers to dampen instabilities during flight, such as Dutch-roll oscillations and other gust-induced oscillations. When a roll angle of an eVTOL aircraft has deviated or is about to deviate from a current stable aircraft state to an undesirable, unstable, and oscillating aircraft state, the ATS system queries a turbulence suppression database that stores a set of propeller speed profiles for mitigation a deviation of a given roll angle for a particular aircraft with specified propellers. Using this data, the eVTOL flight controller adjusts the speed of the propellers for a certain duration of time, according to the propeller speed profiles for mitigating the deviation. In models of aircraft with adjustable propeller angles, the database includes blade angle profiles for mitigating the effects of turbulent conditions. Timing and rate of propeller activation can be pre-computed using higher order computational modeling performed with NASA’s super computing resources. Because the data is pre-computed, the use of the ATS system onboard does not require significant computing resources to implement on eVTOL vehicles. The technology, a mechanism by which existing eVTOL propellers are leveraged to suppress gust-induced oscillations enables a safe and comfortable passenger experience at low-cost and without added hardware.

This NASA-developed eVTOL UAS is a purpose-built, electric, reusable aircraft with rotor/propeller thrust only, designed to fly trajectories with high similarity to those flown by lunar landers. The vehicle has the unique capability to transition into wing borne flight to simulate the cross-range, horizontal approaches of lunar landers. During transition to wing borne flight, the initial transition favors a traditional airplane configuration with the propellers in the front and smaller surfaces in the rear, allowing the vehicle to reach high speeds. However, after achieving wing borne flight, the vehicle can transition to wing borne flight in the opposite (canard) direction. During this mode of operation, the vehicle is controllable, and the propellers can be powered or unpowered. This NASA invention also has the capability to decelerate rapidly during the descent phase (also to simulate lunar lander trajectories). Such rapid deceleration will be required to reduce vehicle velocity in order to turn propellers back on without stalling the blades or catching the propeller vortex. The UAS also has the option of using variable pitch blades which can contribute to the overall controllability of the aircraft and reduce the likelihood of stalling the blades during the deceleration phase. In addition to testing EDL sensors and precision landing payloads, NASA’s innovative eVTOL UAS could be used in applications where fast, precise, and stealthy delivery of payloads to specific ground locations is required, including military applications. This concept of operations could entail deploying the UAS from a larger aircraft.

RAM-C interfaces with computational software to provide test logic and manage a unique process that implements three main bodies of theory: (a) aircraft system identification (SID), (b) design of experiment (DOE), and (c) CFD. SID defines any number of alternative estimation methods that can be used effectively under the RAM-C process (e.g., machine learning techniques, regression, neural nets, fuzzy modeling, etc.). DOE provides a statistically rigorous, sequential approach that defines the test points required for a given model complexity. Typical DOE test points are optimized to reduce either estimation error or prediction error. CFD provides a large range of fidelity for estimating aircraft aerodynamic responses. In initial implementations, NASA researchers “wrapped” RAM-C around OVERFLOW, a NASA-developed high-fidelity CFD flow solver. Alternative computational software requiring less time and computational resources could be also utilized. RAM-C generates reduced-order aerodynamic models of aircraft. The software process begins with the user entering a desired level of fidelity and a test configuration defined in terms appropriate for the computational code in use. One can think of the computational code (e.g., high-fidelity CFD flow solver) as the “test facility” with which RAM-C communicates with to guide the modeling process. RAM-C logic determines where data needs to be collected, when the mathematical model structure needs to increase in order, and when the models satisfy the desired level of fidelity. RAM-C is an efficient, statistically rigorous, automated testing process that only collects data required to identify models that achieve user-defined levels of fidelity – streamlining the modeling process and saving computational resources and time. At NASA, the same Rapid Aero Modeling (RAM) concept has also been applied to other “test facilities” (e.g., wind tunnel test facilities in lieu of CFD software).

The novel approach for optimizing airspeed for both actual and predicted wind conditions in electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft with Distributed Electric Propulsion (DEP) systems includes the process of creating a lookup table for wind‐optimal airspeed as a function of wind magnitude, considering the direction of the wind relative to the cruise segment, considering the cruise altitude for an aircraft type, and incorporating the wind-optimal airspeed lookup table in the performance database for real‐time access by the Flight Management Systems (FMS) to predict wind-optimal airspeed at waypoints of the flight plan. The target wind‐optimal airspeed is updated in real-time throughout the cruise portion of a flight. In a test of the wind-optimal airspeed targeting technique using a multi-rotor aircraft model, results obtained show benefits of flying at the wind‐optimal cruise airspeed compared to the best‐range airspeed. In headwind conditions, energy consumption was reduced by up to 7.5%, and flight duration was reduced by up to 28%. Under uncertain wind magnitudes, flying at wind-optimal airspeed offered lower variability and higher predictability in energy consumption than flying at best‐range airspeed.