A Simulation Architecture for Air Traffic Over Urban Environments Supporting Autonomy Research in Advanced Air Mobility

As part of its research, NASA investigates concepts, aircraft, and operations related to
Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). One of the most challenging scenarios for AAM will be enabling
safe routine access near densely populated urban centers. AAM flight operations over a regional
area require a moderately high-fidelity simulation capability to develop and evaluate autonomy
technologies in the urban environment. This paper aims to describe a system to simulate flight
operations around regions such as the San Francisco-Oakland Bay area at a moderately-high
scale (tens to hundreds of flights) that incorporates detailed vehicle models and control necessary
to support research in airborne autonomy. The flight vehicle utilizes NASA AAM concept
vehicle dynamics integrated with a custom flight management system and flight control system
to simulate all flight phases accurately. The simulation incorporates a detailed simulated urban
environment and includes glass cockpit displays to monitor aircraft operations. Simulation
models integrate to simulate air and ground-based sensors, such as Radar and LiDAR. As
a commercially available rendering engine, X-Plane 11 is used as the renderer to simulate
vision-based sensors (such as onboard and ground-based cameras) with a detailed graphical
model of a city at different times of the day and weather conditions. This paper presents the
simulation and software architecture used for simulating AAM traffic over this urban region.
This system enables the evaluation of NASA research concepts in autonomy for urban AAM
operations on the path toward flight test evaluation.