Robust Hybrid Navigation Unit for Urban Air Mobility Scenarios

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) includes new aeronautical applications encompassing the future on-demand urban human air transportation (e.g. air-taxi) and unmanned aerial system operations for goods delivery and public safety in urban, sub-urban and inter-city areas. One of the key technology enablers of UAM implementation is related to the availability of robust and resilient positioning, navigation and timing measurements. In this context, the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is in principle able to provide valid technological solutions to above required performances that are threatened in dense urban environments. In this framework, the present work describes a hybrid navigation unit for UAM applications implementing all the algorithms for a tightly coupled sensor fusion between a dual frequency multi constellation GNSS receiver, an inertial measurements unit and barometric altitude from an air data computer, together with related autonomous fault detection and exclusion of GPS/Galileo/BeiDou satellites and estimation of navigation solution integrity/accuracy. Such prototype has been validated through real-time hardware-in-the-loop simulations and in-flight demonstrations in reproduced UAM scenarios.