Airborne: Reborn / Volume XII / September 23rd 2020
This week aside from our Top Story looking at NASA’s latest precision landing tech we’ve got air taxi news from South Korea, Boeing cutting back on innovation in the US and CG visions of our flying future from a British aerospace startup and familiar French conglomerate.
A German logistics giant provides an update on their plans for a heavy-lift drone, a big UAV insurance deal is done in London, BVLOS flights take-off in Singapore, a first (and second) commercial rocket launch in Australia, South Africans set their sights on space and the US Air Force awards a million dollar contract for unmanned traffic management - it’s Airborne: Reborn Volume XII, from Osinto.
TOP STORY: From self-driving cars to landing on Mars - NASA’s SPLICE tech set to launch aboard Blue Origin rocket
Neil Armstrong hand-flew the Apollo Lunar module onto the moon’s surface in 1969 - eyeballing the spacecraft onto an 11 x 3 mile target. A suite of NASA technologies collectively known as SPLICE are set to radically improve that accuracy - enabling both the agency’s own and commercial providers’ vehicles to touch down with 50m accuracy on Earth, the moon and Mars.
The NS-13 launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket scheduled for Sept. 24th (watch the livestream here) will fly with an integrated suite of SPLICE sensors as part of a comprehensive flight test programme.
This suborbital flight will test:
Terrain Relative Navigation / TRL - localises the vehicle using an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and camera by making comparisons to pre-loaded surface maps
Descent and Landing Computer / DLC - high performance multicore computer - processes all sensor data, computes hazards and determines safe landing location.
Navigation Doppler Lidar / NDL - lasers and sensors creating highly accurate range and velocity data:
Using multiple laser beams and telescopic lenses the Lidar system is also being developed for commercial use in; self-driving cars, aircraft landing, drone detection, precision targeting and in-air refuelling applications by Psionic who licenced the tech from NASA in 2016:
Broadly speaking any autonomous vehicle system must perform a similar set of tasks to SPLICE - understanding exactly where it is, perceiving the local environment and then making decisions that route it towards a destination by sending instructions to a control system.
Whatever the inputs (camera, Lidar, GPS, IMU) - fusing together incoming streams of sensor data and filtering the noise is a technical challenge on its own. Computing an appropriate decision and sending the requisite control input at sufficient speed is another.
The complexity of this computation is pushing the boundaries of both computer hardware and software. Multicore GPUs are the norm, as are machine learning (ML) algorithms for eg. object detection and classification. ML algorithms get better at predicting (and hence reacting to) unusual edge cases the more they are fed real world training data - hence the immense value in testing integrated systems in real world conditions.
This free Self-Driving Fundamentals course is an excellent primer for generalists. Sebastian Thrun co-founded the company behind it - Udacity - as well as eVTOL pioneers Kittyhawk and the Stanford AI Lab.
Udacity also offer an online Flying Car and Autonomous Flight Engineer Nanodegree that’s well worth a look.
Hyundai Motor Group signed an MOU with Incheon Int’l Airport (Korea’s largest), Hyundai Engineering & Construction and KT Corp (formerly Korea Telecom) targeted at accelerating the development of Urban Air Mobility in South Korea. They’ll work on conducting test flights with an aim of “commercialising UAM by 2028” in line with the Korean government’s UAM Roadmap, unveiled in June (via Hyundai).
Boeing NeXt - the aircraft manufacturer’s two year old innovation unit - will halt operations. The future of their Wisk joint venture with Kittyhawk, SkyGrid joint venture with SparkCognition and investment in Aerion are all reported to be under review as a result (via Seattle Times):
California’s Airmap have been awarded a $1m contract for the provision of traffic management services (UTM) by AFWERX (an innovation unit of the US Air Force) as part of their eVTOL focused Agility Prime programme (via Airmap).
British startup SAMAD Aerospace showed renders of both their proposed e-Starling hybrid-electric ‘business jet’ and an ‘eVTOL aviation village’ (via Aero Mag).
Airbus unveiled three new concept aircraft that could enter service by 2035, each representing “a different approach to achieving zero-emission flight” - all three are powered by hydrogen (via Airbus):
MagniX will supply 2MW electric propulsion systems for Universal Hydrogen’s hydrogen fuel cell conversion of a Dash-8 (via AIN).
The Royal Aeronautical Society published Part One of a report on electric aircraft by Bill Read (via RAeS).
DB Schenker and Volocopter released new images of the autonomous VoloDrone, revealed a plan for a “commercial proof case” to be operational next year and noted that EASA certification is expected to follow in 2023. Capable of moving 200kg payloads 40km the aircraft is aimed at the middle mile B2B logistics market. DB Schenker invested in Volocopter’s €87m Series C this February (via Reuters):
London-based Flock signed a deal with the British Insurance Brokers’ Association that that will see their brokers able to offer the company’s commercial drone insurance cover. The new drone scheme includes cover for BVLOS operations and specific use cases such as drone delivery and swarm light shows (via Ed Leon Klinger).
HTX and ST Engineering conducted their first BVLOS drone flights in Singapore, paving the way for a range of public uses by the Republic’s emergency services (via Straits Times).
Altitude Angel in the UK revealed plans for what they claim would be “the world’s first commercial drone corridor in open and unrestricted airspace” west of London. ‘Project Arrow’ defines an 8 x 0.5km corridor where BVLOS operations would be safely conducted without the need for new hardware, and crucially without closing the airspace to General Aviation traffic. Enabled by the company’s GuardianUTM O/S the project has been submitted to regulator the CAA’s Innovation Sandbox for consideration (via Altitude Angel).
Southern Launch completed Australia’s first commercial launch of a space-capable rocket. Two DART vehicles from Dutch company T-Minus Engineering were launched on Sept. 19th from the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia, putting an earth observation payload into polar sub-orbit (via Spacewatch):
A Request for Information from SANSA - the South African National Space Agency - to assess the feasibility of developing domestic launch capability in the country closed this week (via Defence Web).
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