Frederick II and NASA awarded for joint research on future air mobility

The paper titled "Enhanced AAM Surveillance using Radar/Visual Distributed Sensing" authored by Frederick authors Federica Vitiello, Flavia Causa, Roberto Opromolla and Giancarmine Fasano, and authors Chester Dolph and Todd Ferrante (NASA Langley Research Center), Thomas Lombaerts and Corey Ippolito (NASA Ames Research Center) received the "Best of Track Award" for the track "Urban, Advanced Air Mobility &New Space" as part of the prestigious AIAA/IEEE 44th Digital Avionics Systems Conference held in Montreal, Canada.

The work is within the framework of the five-year collaboration agreement (Space Act Agreement) between Federico II University and NASA, and presents an innovative surveillance strategy for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) that aims to provide reliable information to support the traffic control system and/or pilots, facilitating the safe and efficient management of autonomous air traffic at low altitude.

The methodology has been validated on experimental data collected at NASA Langley center, employing a network of sensing nodes equipped with visual and radar cameras. The proposed system is based on a dual data fusion: first locally (within the individual node) and second centrally, aggregating the estimated tracks from all nodes in the network. The traces thus generated can be compared with cooperative data broadcast by the drones themselves and based on satellite navigation systems, allowing independent validation of this information.