Capstone Project
| Group | 2024-04 | Status | open |
| Title | Advanced Air Mobility for eVTOL Aircraft | ||
| Supervisor | K. Khorasani | ||
| Description | The objective of this Capstone Project is to develop the foundation and groundwork for realization of the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) in Quebec and Canada. AAM (regional and urban) is an emerging sector of air transport resulting from the major advances in electric propulsion (engines, batteries, fuel cells, electronic controllers, etc.) and the growing need for improved people services. Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft are the most recent examples of technology in this sector. The eVTOL aircraft related technology is almost grasped for a relatively nascent industry. The 600+ prototypes, 350 companies involved and $20 billion invested in the aircrafts side of AAM are a vote of confidence.
To be successful and to scale different business cases, AAM will need to address three key challenges. The first one is related to urban integration and social acceptability. AAM operations need to be integrated with current cities and inter-cities infrastructure in ways that are acceptable to local communities, while providing services and experience that offer time saving, good prices and safe journeys. The second challenge is related to Air Traffic Management integration. AAM will most probably evolve in low space, and the industry would need to deploy new technology and procedures to integrate the AAM flights within the existing air traffic system. The third challenge is related to regulation as related to development and certification of eVTOL to ensure safety and performance standards. The establishment of vertiports, which serve as the departure and arrival points for eVTOL aircraft, requires a global solution to ensure harmonized design, construction and operation standards. Standardization would enable interoperability between different vertiports, reducing the complexity of the system and promoting safety and efficiency. The AAM project will have the support and interest of VPorts (https://vports.com/) to create the first regional network of vertiports for electric AAM in Quebec. By 2030, this initiative will extend to all major regions of Quebec and will offer a sustainable transportation solution through electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. This first network will connect all regions of Quebec, including geographically remote communities that are currently not adequately served by ground and air transportation. VPorts network of vertiports will foster the emergence of an AAM technology ecosystem in Quebec and thus provide significant positive socio-economic benefits. According to a socio-economic impact study, VPorts network of AAM infrastructure will generate an economic impact of CDN$6.5 billion for Quebec by 2045. VPorts plans to create more than 1,000 direct jobs in Quebec to support and propel its national and international growth strategies. For AAM, autonomous systems (e.g. UAV) as well as eVTOL one of prevailing challenges for Command & Control (C&C) operators are the decisions that must be made in presence of uncertainties that arise due to their operating environment, malicious adversarial cyberattacks, faults and anomalies that are machine induced. Due to the above ambiguities, C&C human operators will lose trust in these systems that can lead to hesitation and doubts in incorporating autonomous assets for use in day-to-day missions. The proposed investigation on trust, confidence, assurance, and formal verification of autonomous systems will consider and recognize technological barriers and constraints on sensors and actuators. The human-machine interfaces and decision-making processes that determine the critical decisions made due to safety or legal aspects need to be formally analyzed. Of paramount importance is to enable C&C operators to make distinctions between safety critical decisions versus critical functionalities of the mission without compromising safety and trustworthiness of the autonomous systems operations. An optimal and structured architecture to process requirements represents major barriers to full realization and acceptance and utilization of AAM and autonomous systems in Critical Infrastructure ecosystems. A grand challenge to all critical infrastructure stakeholders and the entire infrastructure security ecosystem is to tackle strategically the following questions that will all be addressed in this project: 1. How can the resilience of AAM be assessed or compared with the other systems? 2. How to address the resilience and mitigation concerns considering the interdependencies between AAM, eVTOL, UAVs, or across different domains within an infrastructure? 3. How to prepare standards and guidelines for investment priorities, designs, and upgrades of an infrastructure considering various phases of the resilience cycle? 4. How can the learned lessons from anomalies be leveraged to improve the AAM infrastructure’s resilience? A solution to each of the above four objectives will involve design considerations and performing pros and cons of various approaches and alternatives to determine the optimal solution. The solution should be validated and verified through simulations that should be performed e.g. using Matlab environment or other S/W tools. Finally, the students need to provide a set of recommendations, suggestions, and protocols for pushing their solutions and concepts to high technology readiness levels (TRL), that is TRL 3 and above. These should also form the foundation for the solutions to be ultimately implemented and demonstrated in real eVTOL systems, although this last aspect is beyond the scope of the Capstone Project. For this Capstone Project it is expected that a total of 12 students will participate in with 8 or so of the team members from the ECE students and the other 4 or so students from the MIAE students. This will need to be a truly cross-disciplinary kind of project! Further details can be found from the NASA website at https://www.nasa.gov/aam |
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| Student Requirement | The students are expected to investigate, propose, design, develop, and demonstrate the operational considerations for AAM. Knowledge of control systems, unmanned vehicles (drones), path planning, semi-autonomous to fully autonomous operation of unmanned vehicles, among others are required. | ||
| Tools | CAD software, power supplies, DC motors, servo motors, Oscilloscope, PCB CNC Machine, and soldering equipment, 3D printing. | ||
| Number of Students | 12 | ||
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