Extending Enhanced Visual Operations to Urban Air Mobility: Requirements and Approaches

This paper addresses the possibility to exploit Enhanced Vision Systems (EVS) for landing operations within the Urban Air Mobility (UAM) framework. First, an analysis of sensing requirements is carried out in terms of sensors' Field of View (FOV), operational range, resolution, and frame rate. These requirements are estimated considering different factors such as airspace structure and possible landing trajectories, navigation performance, and wind conditions. A preliminary assessment of the level of maturity of the available technologies is obtained as a result of the comparison of the EVS state of the art and the estimated visual requirements for the UAM scenarios. Finally, the performance of sensing systems fulfilling the previously defined requirements is assessed within a numerical simulation framework able to realistically reproduce UAM landing scenarios including trajectory/attitude disturbances. Specifically, visual-based techniques for pose estimation with respect to a vertiport are developed and then integrated within a multi-sensor fusion architecture combining other sources such as inertial sensors.