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A 3D Simulation Platform for Decentralized Decision-Making in Advanced Air MobilityThis paper presents a general purpose, plug-and-play simulation platform for the use of future aviation stakeholders, such as urban airspace planners, air vehicle operators, ground operation managers, air traffic controllers and aviation researchers. The presented simulator platform is envisioned to serve as a toolkit to visualize, evaluate, and configure future advanced air mobility (AAM) operations. Highlighting features of this toolkit include a modular architecture that allows multiple smart unmanned aerial systems (UASs) to remotely connect to the simulation server and participate in decentralized decision-making scenario simulations. As an example of the decentralized decision-making scenario, an inter-agent negotiation-based conflict resolution use case is considered in this paper, where the UASs leverage the on-board/on-the-edge artificial intelligence (AI) capability to continually build situational awareness, and use this information to predict future conflicts and resolve them through machine-to-machine negotiation. As such operations are non-existent at scale currently, the presented simulation platform offers a viable and cost-effective alternative for assessing the efficacy of AAM research outcomes and challenges in future shared airspace usage. The simulation platform allows plug-n-play connectivity with AI and non-AI compute modules representing individual UAS’s flight control. Each module can interact with the simulation platform independently to communicate current and desired future states, situational awareness, and conflict resolution utilization costs for inter-agent negotiation. The simulation environment orchestrates realistic operational scenarios with spatiotemporal details, dynamic events, tactical conflict-resolution methods, interfaces for customizing air traffic control parameters, and information exchange uncertainties. In the future, this can serve as a community focused cloud simulation platform, incorporating multi-stakeholder airspace constraints from regulatory, government, city, and local agencies.
Document ID
20220006354
Acquisition Source
Ames Research Center
Document Type
Presentation
Authors
Aditya Das
(Ames Research Center Mountain View, California, United States)
Stanley Dillon Hicks
(Universities Space Research Association Columbia, Maryland, United States)
Date Acquired
April 25, 2022
Publication Date
June 27, 2022
Publication Information
URL: https://aviationsystems.arc.nasa.gov
Subject Category
Air Transportation And Safety
Meeting Information
Meeting: AIAA Aviation Forum
Location: Chicago, IL & online
Country: US
Start Date: June 27, 2022
End Date: July 1, 2022
Sponsors: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Funding Number(s)
PROJECT: 109492
CONTRACT_GRANT: NNA16BD14C
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Public Use Permitted.
Technical Review
NASA Technical Management
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