| Description |
The objective of this Capstone Project is to develop the foundation and groundwork for realization of the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and Advanced Urban Mobility (AUM) in Quebec and Canada. AAM (regional) 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. The 600+ prototypes, 350 companies involved and $20 billion invested in the aircraft side of AAM are a vote of confidence.
Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) represents a transformative shift in urban and regional transportation, leveraging electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft to provide safe, sustainable, and efficient air mobility services. These next-generation aircraft will operate in complex, densely populated environments where safety, airworthiness, trustworthiness, and cybersecurity are critical. The avionics and control systems for such platforms must be highly integrated, fault-tolerant, and secure against malicious interference. For ECE students, this presents a unique opportunity to apply skills in embedded systems, control engineering, signal processing, network security, and system integration to a high-impact aerospace challenge. This capstone project challenges students to design, implement, and demonstrate a secure, autonomous flight control and monitoring system for AAM, suitable for testing in both high-fidelity simulations and scaled hardware testbeds.
Why AAM Matters: The global advanced air mobility market is estimated to reach USD 137 billion by 2035, with Canada’s own sector surging from USD 643 million to over USD 8 billion in just a decade. Engineering talent in avionics, autonomy, and cybersecurity will be in unprecedented demand—making this not only a capstone project, but a gateway into the future of transportation.
The global AAM market is projected to reach USD 137.1 billion by 2035, growing at a CAGR of 25.5% from 2025 to 2035. Morgan Stanley goes further by forecasting the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) subset could surpass USD 1 trillion by 2040, and balloon to USD 9 trillion by 2050. The AAM market in Canada reached USD 643.1 million in 2024 and is anticipated to grow to USD 8.07 billion by 2035, at a CAGR of 26.3%. As North America’s fastest-growing AAM region, Canada presents increasing industrial and research opportunities. Global investment in AAM technologies exceeded USD 7 billion in 2021, with significant airline and infrastructure activity underway. Companies such as Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation are positioning for eVTOL operations in the mid-2020s, supported by buy ratings and growing revenue forecasts.
Why This Capstone Project Matters for Students: (a) Career Readiness: This is not an academic fiction - students working on AAM systems today are preparing for jobs in a multibillion-dollar industry tomorrow. (b) Chance for Impact: AAM systems aim to revolutionize urban transit, emergency services, and logistics—students can contribute to genuinely transformative technology. (c) Regional Advantage: With Canada emerging as a leading growth region, students working on AAM projects may connect with local R&D, innovation grants, and emerging startups.
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.
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. Aéroports de Montréal (ADM) network of vertiports will foster the emergence of an AAM technology ecosystem in Quebec and thus provide significant positive socio-economic benefits.
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 number of the further main objectives in this Capstone Project are as follows: (A) Design a modular avionics control unit integrating flight control, navigation, and communication subsystems. (B) Implement a secure communication link between the aircraft and a Ground Control Station, resistant to cyberattacks. (C)Develop real-time fault detection and recovery algorithms for safety-critical flight operation. (D) Demonstrate the system in both simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) environments. (E) Implement sensor fusion using IMU, GPS, and vision/LIDAR data. (F) Include battery health monitoring and energy management features. (G) Design the system to be scalable for future eVTOL certification pathways.
A solution to the above 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 2 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.
To summarize, this project directly addresses the airworthiness and trustworthiness requirements of emerging AAM aircraft. It prepares students for roles in aerospace, robotics, autonomous systems, and cybersecurity, while aligning with Transport Canada, FAA, and EASA safety priorities. The work could contribute to future certification research, making it attractive to aerospace companies and public-sector R&D.
For this Capstone Project it is expected that a total of 6-8 students will participate from the ECE Department. 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.
Resources Required:
Development boards (e.g., STM32 Nucleo, Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA Jetson for vision tasks). UAV simulator software (PX4, QGroundControl, Gazebo, MATLAB). Sensors (IMU, GPS, LIDAR module, camera). Wireless communication modules (Wi-Fi, LoRa, or custom RF). Access to lab space with HIL simulation capability. Optional: scaled quadcopter test platform.
Expected Learning Outcomes. Students will gain experience in:
• Avionics system design for aerospace applications
• Embedded programming and real-time operating systems
• Secure wireless communication protocol implementation
• Sensor fusion and control systems engineering
• Cybersecurity for safety-critical systems
• System integration, testing, and certification awareness |