NASA’s Advanced Air Mobility Project: ANRA to Provide UAM Services for Multi-Year Project to Develop Passenger Drones and Other Advanced Air Mobility Solutions

 ANRA Technologies has won a leading place in NASA’s new advanced air mobility project, the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate National Campaign 2 for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) for Community Planning and Integration.  ANRA will work FlyOhio, a collaboration of public, private and academic institutions led by DriveOhio’s advanced air mobility (AAM) group, to address the safety issues and other barriers to integrating passenger drones and other advanced air mobility vehicles into transportation systems.  This win comes after ANRA successfully completed NASA AAM NC (X3) simulations in 2020 as a provider of services for UAM, testing scenarios in a simulated environment.

ANRA has been a key player in the global development of unmanned traffic management (UTM) and other drone integration technologies.  For NASA’s Advanced Air Mobility project, ANRA will be the primary Provider of Services for UAM (PSU) technology for this multi-year program, enabling information sharing between aircraft operators and other stakeholders, and leading the development and testing of PSU integration with vertiport automation services.

The issue of advanced air mobility is made more complex because while many urban air mobility vehicles exist, new solutions are being developed.

NASA states AAM can be characterized by: (1) novel vehicle configurations that are enabled by the electrification of the propulsion system inclusive of all-electric and hybrid-electric propulsion architectures; (2) levels of vehicle autonomous operations and reduced pilot/operator workload while achieving improved trajectory compliance; and (3) operations at densities that cannot be managed by current air traffic management system architectures.

“We are honored to be part of the winning FlyOhio team and look forward to helping NASA advance the entire AAM ecosystem through operational testing and demonstration approach, robust technology research and evaluation activities, and collaboration with community organizations and stakeholders,” said Amit Ganjoo, Founder and CEO for ANRA.

The FlyOhio team will collaborate with NASA on “multi-modal transportation planning, modeling, and simulations of the AAM portion of a transportation system,” says a press release.  The team will explore the impacts of passenger drones and other AAM vehicles on communities: addressing “public acceptance (including noise issues), community engagement, infrastructure planning,” and more.

“Advanced Air Mobility technology is revolutionizing the transportation industry and Ohio is well-positioned to lead market adoption as these solutions scale. At DriveOhio, we are committed to developing and deploying connected, automated, shared, and electric vehicles and infrastructure on the ground and in the air. This program is a manifestation of that ethos, and we are excited to increase the advanced aviation investment in Ohio’s economy,” said Howard Wood, executive director at DriveOhio.