NASA and SkyGrid Team Up to Drive Innovation in Autonomous Aviation

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SkyGrid, a Boeing and SparkCognition company, is partnering with NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) to integrate essential services, functions, and capabilities for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) aircraft operations. This collaboration aligns with NASA Langley’s broader strategy to advance autonomous aviation and enhance airspace safety and accessibility.

The partnership, led by NASA’s System-Wide Safety Project, focuses on two key components. The first involves incorporating SkyGrid’s traffic surveillance software into distributed cooperative airspace management systems like the Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM) System and Provider of Unmanned Aerial Mobility Services (PSU). This initiative will culminate in comprehensive flight demonstrations.

The second component addresses specific use cases to improve transportation effectiveness by optimizing Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) operations in various National Airspace System (NAS) environments while considering essential safety factors. In urban settings, potential operations include life-saving para-public services and efficient cargo delivery, utilizing both existing and new surveillance data and processing methods. This component aims to calibrate and validate models, methods, tools, and techniques essential for enhancing operational safety and efficiency under real-world conditions.

“Through our collaboration with SkyGrid, NASA aims to foster the integration of highly-automated systems in aviation, a step that not only enhances operational efficiency but fundamentally elevates safety standards,” said Dr. Kyle Ellis, Project Manager for NASA’s System-Wide Safety project. “The System-Wide Safety project is committed to innovating how we predict, analyze, and mitigate risks in aviation as it becomes more complex and integrated with advanced systems. By working with SkyGrid, we will leverage their technological advancements to refine our advanced safety models and tools.”

Through this collaboration, SkyGrid and NASA will also work on developing new standards and procedures to ensure the safe operation of autonomous aircraft systems. This includes sharing critical data, experiences, and insights to formulate safety cases, risk assessments, and safety management systems tailored to the demands of emerging aviation technologies.

“This partnership enables us to leverage NASA Langley’s unparalleled research capabilities and SkyGrid’s deep expertise in operationalizing autonomy to advance the safety and efficiency of autonomous aviation,” stated Jia Xu, CEO of SkyGrid. “By combining our efforts, we are not just aiming to advance the technology but also enhance the safety frameworks in traffic surveillance to support autonomous aviation.”