Autonomous Aerial Cargo Operations at Scale

This project will establish an algorithmic foundation that will support the development, deployment and adoption of advanced air mobility systems for autonomous cargo operations at scale. It will not only develop the theory behind the algorithms, new concepts of operations and models for the design, verification and operation of advanced mobility systems but also mature the algorithms to demonstrate them on data and platforms representative of the envisioned complexity and scale of these systems.

A number of advances from increasingly autonomous vehicles of diverse types and capabilities to enabling infrastructure technologies to concepts and tools for traffic management to growing appetite for new services have brought air mobility to the brink of a transformation. It is exactly the time for us to ask how this transformation will change air mobility and how we can ensure the intended impact from it, and this project is set to address these very questions. 

The project addresses three technical challenges:

Technical challenge 1: Compositional, system-level verification. TC1 focuses on establishing verifiable—either by synthesis or by post-design analysis—guarantees that the traffic management, strategic deconfliction and tactical deconfliction, when implemented together, satisfy system-level safety specifications and other regulatory requirements.  

Technical challenge 2: Co-design for promoting public acceptance. TC2 focuses on systematically accounting for the factors that may impede public acceptance of and scalable growth in advanced air mobility. Such factors include the noise footprint, ground infrastructure for communication, privacy concerns due to close-proximity and frequent operations, and the (perceived) risks of autonomous operations.  

Technical challenge 3: Optimized cargo operations at scale. We conjecture that the effective use of autonomous aerial systems for both long-distance and last-mile delivery will lower costs and stimulate the demand for air cargo. TC3 will develop algorithms to optimize the operator’s objectives subject to the constraints from TC1 and TC2 (with respect to, e.g., noise, communication infrastructure, privacy, and perceived risks), air traffic management constraints and the objectives of the operators.  

We emphasize that these challenges are interdependent, and failure to address any one of them will undermine the progress in the others and hinder safe and efficient growth of autonomous operations. 

Additionally, the project will be receptive to the underlying system architecture, including the physical and communication infrastructure, and the regulatory requirements. Equally importantly, it will help identify system-level vulnerabilities and provide systematic guidance for revising architectural and regulatory decisions. 

While the project addresses research challenges cutting across both cargo and passenger aviation at all scales, it will, whenever necessary, focus on autonomous cargo operations from last-mile delivery to to city scale to regional scale to national scale.