Survey of Capabilities and Gaps in External Perception Sensors for Autonomous Urban Air Mobility Applications

Abstract

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-1114.vid In order to enable autonomous operations in emerging aviation markets, including Urban Air Mobility (UAM), systems must be able to build an accurate and detailed understanding of the state of the vehicle and its surrounding environment. As a first step, it is critical to understand the capabilities and gaps in sensing technologies’ ability to perceive vehicle state, environmental conditions and obstacles, as these capabilities impose fundamental limits on the autonomous system’s ability to fly safely. This effort aims to measure the ability of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) sensors to meet the needs of perception systems for UAM operation. The select sensors must also meet the constrained size weight power and cost (SWAP-C) necessary to meet the demands of urban air vehicles. This paper gives an overview of our preliminary gap analysis approach, including an overview of the functions of an autonomous perception system, and surveys of COTS sensor capabilities. Sense and avoid, of both static (terrain, buildings, hovering vehicles) and dynamic (aircraft, small drones, birds) obstacles, is identified as a challenge. Initial results are presented, showing many COTS capabilities have limited margins in meeting this need, and may fall short depending on processing times.