How Urban Air Mobility is getting ready for passengers: the NTU Singapore case
Singapore’s NTU flew its eVTOL prototypes in Germany. See what it means for urban air mobility, and why safety starts in flight control.
At Embention, we work daily for improving safety and functionality on our systems. For this purpose, we have recently released the Primary Flight Display with Situational Awareness. Using the Veronte Pipe control software in conjunction with a flight simulator, Situational Awareness functionality is added to the system. It permits to safely perform the flight control with drones and remotely piloted aircraft (RPAS), also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or any unmanned aircraft system (UAS). The real-time synchronization replicates live aircraft movement on a 3D aircraft model flying in a virtual environment, representing the real operation and environment and displaying flight information.
Situational Awareness algorithms provide extra safety to the system. The integration of this real-time technology and the visualization of the airspace together with terrain and obstacles is essential for UAV operators when performing Beyond Line of Sight (BLOS) operations. This virtual environment permits operators to avoid collisions with mountains, terrain, and buildings.
Characteristics of the Veronte PFD with Situational Awareness
The Situational Awareness in Veronte PFD works using a flight simulator for representing the worldwide geographical scenarios: lands, seas, mountains, cities, airports, airfields, heliports, etc. In addition, unlike other 3D PFDs, an internet connection is not necessary, so it can be operated from any location and environment without any delays in scenario loading.
This feature displays a 3D view of the aircraft that is being piloted, while it permits to use it as a 3D PFD (Primary Flight Display) when using the 1st camera view. This system permits to display custom aircraft models in the virtual environment. The planemaker tool is available for creating custom models, which the operator can see in the interface aircraft model that is being flown.
The simulator used for the integration with Veronte Pipe to provide the situational awareness environment is based on the X-Plane Simulator, supporting home and professional licenses. This simulator permits the configuration of camera views in any direction and even makes it possible to open several X-Plane windows simultaneously, providing different perspectives on the mission that is being performed.
