Turbulence is widespread in the atmosphere, and safe aircraft operations require predictions of turbulence to reduce encounters with severe and extreme turbulence, and appropriate responses when…

This is a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II contract awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to Barron Associates, Inc., a small business research and development company based in Charlottesville, Virginia. The contract, valued at $749,958, is focused on developing novel technologies to enable increasing levels of automation and autonomy in future air transportation systems, particularly for distributed electric propulsion vertical take-off and landing (DEP VTOL) vehicles.

The key objectives are to expand the company's previous work on quantifying turbulence in flight, learning turbulence environments, and mission planning to minimize turbulence hazards. This involves selecting appropriate turbulence models, extending the online turbulence quantification and learning algorithms, and demonstrating expanded mission planning capabilities to support a broader range of DEP VTOL vehicle operations. The contract is designated as a total small business set-aside, leveraging Barron Associates' expertise in developing innovative aerospace and defense technologies through SBIR programs.

Turbulence is widespread in the atmosphere, and safe aircraft operations require predictions of turbulence to reduce encounters with severe and extreme turbulence, and appropriate responses when hazardous turbulence is encountered. Current airspace operations rely largely on humans to mitigate turbulence hazards at the flight planning stage and in flight. The future air transportation system with greatly expanded use of UAS and with new types of urban air mobility operations will have increasing levels of automation and autonomy, and many operations will be conducted without a skilled human operator onboard. Automated systems will be needed to perform turbulence hazard mitigation tasks currently allocated to humans. Future operations will also involve new types of vehicles, especially distributed electric propulsion (DEP) vtol vehicles, and a greatly increased density of operations in environments with unique turbulence characteristics, including the urban canyon. Enabling increasing levels of autonomy envisioned for future airspace operations without compromising flight safety will require novel technologies for predicting turbulence, automatically planning missions that minimize turbulence hazards, recognizing and quantifying turbulence in flight, and appropriately and automatically responding to inflight turbulence. In the context of a passenger carrying DEP vtol vehicle, phase i demonstrated the feasibility of quantifying turbulence in flight, of learning a turbulence environment over multiple flights, and of mission planning based on the learned environment. Phase II examine the sensitivity of DEP vtol vehicles to a broader range of turbulence characteristics, select a set of turbulence models that captures the most relevant turbulence characteristics, extend the online turbulence quantification and learning algorithms to this expanded set of models, and demonstrate expanded mission planning capabilities supporting a broader range of missions.