NASA Phase II SBIR Award for Development of a Turbulence Modeling and Decision Support System for UAM

Enabling increasing levels of autonomy envisioned for future airspace operations without compromising flight safety will require novel technologies for predicting turbulence, automatically planning missions that minimize turbulence hazards, recognizing and quantifying turbulence in flight, and appropriately and automatically responding to inflight turbulence.  In the context of a passenger carrying DEP VTOL vehicle, Barron Associates previously demonstrated the feasibility of quantifying turbulence in flight, of learning a turbulence environment over multiple flights, and of mission planning based on the learned environment.  Under a newly awarded Phase II SBIR research effort, Barron Associates will examine the sensitivity of DEP VTOL vehicles to a broader range of turbulence characteristics, select a set of turbulence models that captures the most relevant turbulence characteristics, extend the online turbulence quantification and learning algorithms to this expanded set of models, and demonstrate expanded mission planning capabilities supporting a broader range of missions.