Advanced Air Mobility
With increasingly connected cities, Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is becoming a crucial element to enable people to reach their destinations quickly, safely, and cost-effectively. Driven by the challenges of urbanization, traffic congestion, and increasing digitalization, the pace of change in urban mobility is shifting towards more flexible, reliable, affordable, sustainable, and user-oriented solutions. AAM aims to transport people and cargo in urban and suburban areas using compact aircraft. These vehicles are expected to transport goods under all weather conditions and to move people faster, quieter, with lower emissions, and more cost-effectively than conventional aircraft. Integrating these vehicles into the existing Air Traffic Management (ATM) system will be another key task. Aviation has been considered a very safe mode of transport since the advent of commercial aviation, based on the number of accidents per flight movement. These safety standards must also be maintained for AAM, allowing it to become an efficient mobility option by utilizing the third dimension. AAM vehicles rely on a combination of drone technology and autonomous vehicle systems and require very short takeoff and landing areas, with "Vertiport" pads of a few meters in length being sufficient for VTOL operations. Parallel to this, integration, especially into urban areas, must be ensured due to the increased environmental risks from high ground-level population density. The requirements for the implementation of AAM are
- Ensure the level of safety in demanding urban airspaces,
- Logistically optimal, procedurally safe placement and design of take-off/landing areas and their connection to flight routes,
- Intelligent bundling concepts (swarm flights, flow-oriented traffic guidance) of drones to serve temporary, locally centered high-demand peaks, using artificial intelligence (AI),
- predicting the complex microclimatic conditions in urban areas using robustly planned trajectories and
- Use of smart infrastructures for navigation and monitoring of drones, supported by real-time capable, cell-based communication networks (5G)
The cooperation with the newly founded Chair of Helicopter Technologies at the institute will also benefit this undertaking.
Current Research Projects
- Air-Take-Off: Collision avoidance between drones and manned aviation with the application case of air take-off in the Lausitz region
- Research Training Group RTG AirMetro: 33 doctoral projects along with associated projects at participating professorships focussing on AAM
Completed Research Projects
Development of a new potential area
Since 2019, TU Dresden has been one of the eleven Excellence Universities in Germany. Within the scope of excellence, the Faculty of Transportation Sciences will become an important part of the new potential area of Automated and Networked Mobility. Urban Air Mobility will play a key role here.