A Tutorial on Autonomy and Advanced Air Mobility: Aviation Paradigm Change

Aviation is undergoing a revolution and a paradigm change. New technologies are moving aviation towards on demand transportation, often referred to as Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). To fully realize the promise of "anyone, anytime, anywhere" AAM transportation, autonomy must play a key role.Our research team is focused on the intersection of new vehicle eVTOL configurations, popularly known as "air taxis", and autonomous flight in complex urban environment. It has been widely recognized that dealing with contingencies, especially in safe, scalable and flexible way, is the most difficult challenge for autonomy. The tutorial session is intended to outline what we consider fundamental challenges and describe our current approaches. Moreover, we are working on establishing wide ranging collaborations to address these fundamental autonomy challenges in a relevant environment with real-world assumptions and constraints. Hence, we would like to take this opportunity to discuss open challenge problems with this research community.The main objective of this tutorial paper is to familiarize the audience with the inherent challenges of safe autonomous flight that is a required paradigm shift enabling economically feasible large scale on-demand movement of cargo and people. To allow full exploitation of AAM, we consider eVTOL configurations, with their over actuated multi-modal dynamics, operating in complex urban environments. There have been significant advances in robotics, artificial intelligence/machine learning, path-planning and control that advanced autonomous capabilities of aerial robots. However, the requirements of an integrated vehicle system capable of safe autonomous flight under both nominal and off-nominal conditions have not been addressed. The session is designed to outline compelling research challenges and to facilitate wider community engagement in advancing the science of autonomy for aviation.