On-Demand Mobility (ODM) Technical Pathway: Enabling Ease of Use and Safety

On-demand mobility (ODM) through aviation refers to the ability to quickly and easily move people or equivalent cargo without delays introduced by lack of, or infrequently, scheduled service. A necessary attribute of ODM is that it be easy to use, requiring a minimum of special training, skills, or workload. Fully-autonomous vehicles would provide the ultimate in ease-of-use (EU) but are currently unproven for safety-critical applications outside of a few, situationally constrained applications (e.g. automated trains operating in segregated systems). Applied to aviation, the current and near-future state of the art of full-autonomy, may entail undesirable trade-offs such as very conservative operational margins resulting in reduced trip reliability and transportation utility. Furthermore, acceptance by potential users and regulatory authorities will be challenging without confidence in autonomous systems in developed in less critical, but still challenging applications. A question for the aviation community is how we can best develop practical ease-of-use for aircraft that are sized to carry a small number of passengers (e.g. 1-9) or equivalent cargo. Such development is unlikely to be a single event, but rather a managed, evolutionary process where responsibility and authority transitions from human to automation agents as operational experience is gained with increasingly intelligent systems. This talk presents a technology road map being developed at NASA Langley, as part of an overall strategy to foster ODM, for the development of ease-of-use for ODM aviation.