Navigation and guidance requirements for commercial VTOL operations

The NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) has undertaken a research program to develop the navigation, guidance, control, and flight management technology base needed by Government and industry in establishing systems design concepts and operating procedures for VTOL short-haul transportation systems in the 1980s time period. The VALT (VTOL Automatic Landing Technology) Program encompasses the investigation of operating systems and piloting techniques associated with VTOL operations under all-weather conditions from downtown vertiports; the definition of terminal air traffic and airspace requirements; and the development of avionics including navigation, guidance, controls, and displays for automated takeoff, cruise, and landing operations. The program includes requirements analyses, design studies, systems development, ground simulation, and flight validation efforts

Communication Aware Mobile Robot Teams

The type of scenarios that could benefit from a team of robots that are able to self configure into an ad-hoc multi-hop mobile communication network while completing a task in an unknown environment, range from search and rescue in a partially collapsed building to providing a security perimeter around a region of interest. In this thesis, we present a hybrid system that enables a team of robots to maintain a prescribed end-to-end data rate while moving through a complex unknown environment, in a distributed manner, to complete a specific task. This is achieved by a systematic decomposition of the real-time situational awareness problem into subproblems that can be efficiently solved by distributed optimization. The validity of this approach is demonstrated through multiple simulations and experiments in which the a team of robots is able to accurately map an unknown environment and then transition to complete a traditional situational awareness task. We also present MCTP, a lightweight communication protocol that is specifically designed for use in ad-hoc multi-hop wireless networks composed of low-cost low-power transceivers. This protocol leverages the spatial diversity found in mobile robot teams as well as recently developed robust routing systems designed to minimize the variance of the end-to-end communication link. The combination of the hybrid system and MCTP results in a system that is able to complete a task, with minimal global coordination, while providing near loss-less communication over an ad-hoc multi-hop network created by the members of the team in unknown environments